A former Nixon associate says he overheard Nixon order the Watergate break-in.
As a confirmed wallower in that scandal, I've always believed that Nixon either ordered the break-in or gave a non-specific order that that kind of thing be done. Still, this admission by Jeb Magruder comes so long after the event and is so unsubstantiated by hard evidence that I have a hard time believing it.
The dangers of wireless internet access.
By the way: This article is on the Washington Post website and like many to which I link, you have to register for the site in order to read the article. Some folks have informed me that they don't like to register for newspaper sites, mainly because they fear they'll wind up on even more spam mailing lists. I don't think the major newspapers do that but if you're worried about this, there's an easy solution. Get an extra e-mail address for sign-ups. Your Internet Service Provider may offer you extra screen names for no extra cost. If they don't, go to some service like Hotmail, get a new e-mail address for free and use it whenever you have to sign up for something. Very simple, very safe.
I've received (so far) exactly 50 e-mails commenting on my comments about William Bennett. What with deadlines, I don't think I have time to answer most of them, so I'm not going to answer any of them. Thank you all for writing and I did read them all. But a script awaits…
Bill Maher has started a weblog with hard-to-read graphics. I assume that will change.
Last one for a while. But I wanted to point out that when the gambling scandal first broke, here's what the author of The Book of Virtues was saying in the press…
"Over 10 years, I'd say I've come out pretty close to even." [source]
And here's what he's saying now…
"I lost money. Overall, you lose money. And that's a — important lesson, I think — you can draw a lesson here. You will lose at the end of the day. They say it's not hard to win, it's hard to leave winning. And that's true, the house — the house will get you. I didn't lose what's been reported in the papers…I lost enough money to make a difference in terms of — you know — (CLEARS THROAT) counting up has made a difference in our lives. But I certainly know what I lost. I don't really think the amounts are anybody's business but the family's and the I.R.S. But, yeah, I lost. And over eight or ten years, you will lose." [source]
I didn't read all of The Book of Virtues. Anything in there about lying to try and cover up personal failings?
George Guay sends the following thoughts, most of which I think are correct…
There's an additional, interesting wrinkle to Bennett's statements about not wanting to enforce the Texas sodomy law. From the mid60s, when the Supreme Court recognized that a right to privacy was implicit in the US Constitution (such that a state could not prohibit the sale of contraceptives to a husband and wife), people like Bennett have railed against subsequent Supreme Court decisions based on this right to privacy. Their so-called "strict constructionist" philosophy basically said that if a right isn't mentioned in the Constitution, then it isn't a right. So what happened to Bennett (and other conservatives) advocacy of a "strict constructionist" approach? How come they don't object to the Texas case on those grounds? Also, the Court's Texas decision was significant in that it didn't focus on the right to privacy as much as it was rooted in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. So the Court was saying that, as a matter of fairness, the Texas law was unconstitutional. That's a second, separate legal basis for rejecting the law, and potentially, a stronger reason to extend most if not all other protections provided in the Constitution to gays and lesbians.
Whenever I hear someone claim to be a "strict constructionist," I think, "Ah, here's someone who's figured out a way to pass off his personal prejudices as Thomas Jefferson's." This is especially true if they also start muttering about "original intent." They're like those sleazy well-merchandised evangelists claiming that if you don't buy their whole worldview (and donate cash to support it), you're going against God's will. Always beware of anyone in the political arena who's hiding behind a "higher authority," whether it's The Lord or the Founding Fathers. It all makes for one of the things that most dismays me about public discourse, which is that no one stands up for principle over immediate gratification. When was the last time you saw anyone — liberal or conservative — say, "I don't like the result of this but we have to look at the larger principle"?
I don't know that so-called "strict constructionists" usually say that a right isn't a right unless it's spelled out in the Constitution. After all, the ninth amendment does say that "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people" and the tenth says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." I think such people simply look to the law for social engineering. They don't like the idea of two men having a loving, healthy relationship and they figure there must be a way to use the courts to stop it. Guys like Bennett cannot get off the subject of how they think everyone else should live. (Actually, they don't think; they know. It comes to them from God and the Constitution both and so must be enforced…)
The thing I don't think they "get" — or maybe they do, but they're making too much money to admit their cause is unwinnable in the long range — is that the country inevitably moves in the direction of liberation. You can slow it down, you can punish people for a time, you can clog the court system…but you cannot stop it or force it permanently back in the other direction, any more than you can get women back into bathing suits that cover their knees. For years, people who published or distributed sex books and movies were thrown in prison and had their lives ruined, but none of that stopped the eventual acceptance of pornography. You can buy it in supermarkets and airport gift shops and even download it onto your home computer now. Gays have been persecuted, beaten, ostracized and otherwise punished for following their hearts and libidos, but none of it has ever permanently stopped the drift towards gay rights and acceptance. It's not a battle fully won, of course, but it's farther along than it's ever been…and in interviews like the one I linked to, you can sense Bennett and some of the others bracing themselves to lose it altogether. Right now, I suspect right-wing leaders are viewing the issue of Gay Marriage as something they may be able to manipulate to energize their base and get lots of donations and activism for a time…but I don't think they seriously think they're going to be able to prevent Phil and Norman from someday joining in matrimony, maybe even of the holy variety.
Sorry if I awoke in a preachy mood myself this morning but I really think we give guys like Bill Bennett too much credit for adhering to long-range principle and too little for manipulating the public discourse for quick gains. There are no lofty ethics behind what he does; only a good awareness of what may enable social conservatives to win a few minor skirmishes, plus he also knows what will stir up the concerns of those who will buy his books or pay his lecture fees. Then it's probably back to Vegas to blow it all on the Megabucks Jackpot, which he has a better chance of winning than he has of seriously rolling back gay rights.
I'm way behind in doing these. Sorry. Lynne Naylor is a terrific talent, especially when it comes to drawing cute ladies. She works primarily in animation where she's labored for almost every studio and won a lot of awards and you can see why if you browse her website.
Tuesday night on Dog Eat Dog (NBC): People throwing fish at each other. Set your VCR.
(The reference is to the fact that Scott, in his wonderful Oddball Comics series, sometimes showcases "fish-in-the-face" covers. These are comic books where some editor or artist thought it would be really commercial to show someone on the cover being hit in the face with a fish. You'd be amazed how many of these there have been. Here's an example Scott posted on his page about a year ago.)
(While I've got you here: I should mention that if you go to Scott's site, you'll see that he's just completed a week featuring issues of Herbie, a wonderfully silly comic that is lovingly remembered by anyone who ever read an issue. I have cut down my visits to the parent website, Comic Book Resources, because of extremely-annoying pop-up ads and a couple of even-more-annoying folks on the message boards. But Scott's page is worth navigating through both kinds of obstacles.)
William Bennett has made a lot of money lecturing us on his version of morality. It is, to me, a very inconsistent, self-serving one, condemning almost every sin or near-sin committed by the poor or non-white, and overlooking or rationalizing almost every sin or near-sin that helps rich white guys get richer. He has also lost a lot of that money placing sucker bets in Las Vegas. Reports put it at eight million, a figure Bennett denies. Since he won't specify the real amount, I'm guessing it's not a lot below eight million.
Anyway, Bennett is starting his Image Rehabilitation Tour this weekend on Tim Russert, and a transcript is up at NBC's press site. It's full of wonderful typos and homonyms and misunderstandings by the transcriber. Note that in the part I'm quoting below, "dissent" is replaced with "descent," which is a much more appropriate word in the context. In fact, read all of this brief excerpt and then I have a point to make…
TIM RUSSERT: The United States Supreme Court ruled that a Texas law against sodomy should be struck down. That sex between consenting adults of the same sex should not be illegal. Canada now says that gay couples should be married. Is gay marriage in the United States of America inevitable?
BILL BENNETT: Good question. I don't know if it's inevitable. This was quite a decision from the Supreme Court. I agreed with Justice Thomas in descent, he said, "I would not have enforced this Texas law." And this Texas law the constable came and arrested these two guys. I wouldn't arrest people for that. But that's a different question from whether you validate and bless what it is homosexuals are doing, their sexual activity and their intimacy by calling it marriage or something like marriage. And I would be opposed to that. Is it — is it coming? I don't know.
"I would not have enforced this Texas law?" Huh? Isn't this the same William Bennett who, during the impeachment hearings, couldn't utter a sentence without the words "rule of law" in it? I thought the Republican/conservative position was that if a law is on the books, it should either be enforced by the authorities or removed via due process. That was, I thought, one of the great fibs of that whole nastiness…the notion that the law is the law and that all alleged violations must be vigorously pursued. We all know that every prosecutor in the country routinely dismisses a large percentage of the cases he or she could haul into court, either because the evidence seems insufficient or because resources are limited and it makes sense to press the cases that most impact the public good. Until the recent Supreme Court decision pretty much buried them, there were laws in some states against even heterosexual oral sex between married partners. No District Attorney enforced them because no District Attorney wanted the public to drag him into the street and beat him to death.
What Bennett wanted in this case was to have it both ways: He wanted the law to condemn sodomy and homosexual relations. But he also knew that the more middle-of-the-road Americans have seen gays prosecuted and persecuted, the more they've moved towards the position that such persecution is wrong. The only way to keep anti-gay laws on the books, Bennett knew for years, was to not enforce "the rule of law," or at least to not enforce it too visibly. He's lost that battle but he's giving up. As you'll see if you read the interview, he's still trying to convince people that homosexuality can be regarded as a choice; that gays can and will turn straight if we just lecture them enough, pass enough laws and force the Bible on them. I don't think very many people who oppose gay rights really believe that…but they don't know what else to say.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart remains the sharpest comedy show I've seen in years…and Mr. Stewart is a much better interviewer of folks in the news than just about anyone around. including all so-called professional newsfolks. The other day, he did a long conversation with Joseph Wilson, who is the diplomat who was dispatched to Africa to investigate reports that Iraq was purchasing yellowcake uranium with which it might nuke us. Wilson reported back that the story was not true but someone somewhere decided it was and kept it in some (not all) of the White House's briefs about why we needed to go to war. I don't know that anyone else has interviewed Mr. Wilson but I doubt they could have done a better job than Stewart did.
From what I can tell, this episode reruns twice during the day on Monday — once in the morning, once in the afternoon or early evening, both on Comedy Central. If and when the interview gets posted to the Comedy Central website, I'll alert you. But you might want to set the TiVo for it now…or better still, get a season pass to the smartest show on television.
Two articles over on Slate analyze and parse the new Congressional report on how our intelligence system failed to anticipate the 9/11 tragedies. The report runs 900 pages (some of them, redacted) and since you're not going to read it, you might want to read Fred Kaplan and Timothy Noah. The bottom line seems to be that there were a few screw-ups in the past and that appallingly little has been done to improve the situation.
This is the war in Iraq we're asking about. Here's the current dollar figure. And of course, there's also the little matter of Americans dying.
Paul Dini's comely Christmas chorine, Jingle Belle, goes to the Comic-Con. Right here.
The current issue of Locus, the science fiction news magazine, is a special issue guest-edited by master illustrator Charles Vess. The topic is graphic novels, and there's an interview with Alan Moore, articles by Neil Gaiman, Richard Pini, Harlan Ellison and others, plus other fun stuff. Here's a link to a page that will tell you the full contents and if you navigate around, you can probably find a way to order a copy. I've been around fandom long enough to recall a time when science-fiction fans acted as if they were way up on the food chain compared to us funnybook fanciers.
Back then, Locus would rather have ceased publication than write about the comic book field, and now they've gone and done this very nice issue about graphic novels. How far we've come.
A 74-year-old woman was wandering through a Detroit casino one day when she found a nickel in an unattended slot machine. She attempted to play it but casino employees rushed up and surrounded the woman. She was questioned and photographed. Then they confiscated both the nickel and a meal ticket she was holding, plus they ejected her from the casino and warned her that she'd be arrested if she ever returned. She sued the casino and a mediator suggested settling her claim for $17,000. The casino rejected this amount as exorbitant and allowed her suit to continue. Guess the end of this story.