The Weekly Dish

Bush’s avoidances

Does the president have a problem with admitting mistakes? I’m beginning to wonder whether he might — not because, like most presidents, he tries to put the best gloss on his policies. I wonder because a little concession to critics (and to the blindingly obvious) would actually help him put a better gloss on himself. Instead of making arch jokes at a press dinner about looking for weapons of mass destruction under desks and tables in the White House, couldn’t the president have appeared on television at some point to say, in effect, “We appear to have gotten the intelligence wrong on Saddam’s alleged stockpiles of chemical weapons, but I still made the right decision for the right reasons with the information I had in front of me”?

Yes, he has said the second part of that sentence, but the first part makes it all the more credible. Couldn’t he also say, “Yes, we underestimated the threat of Islamist terrorism before 9/11. But we have more than made up for it since”? Again, he can only muster the second sentence. Or how about: “I know many gays and lesbians, respect and like them, but I still believe marriage should be between a man and a woman”?

How hard would that have been? And how different the impact. The worry I have is that the president is afraid to show fallibility because he thinks it shows weakness. In fact, the inability to concede failure is itself the truest sign of weakness and insecurity. We all make mistakes. What matters is that we can acknowledge and correct them. The president, in my view, would only help himself if he were able to make concessions that are the flip-side of confidence and strength.

’Cynical sentimentalist’

There was something poignant and predictable about broadcasting legend Alistair Cooke’s death only a month after he stopped delivering his weekly”Letterfrom America” for the BBC. Maybe it’s hard to convey to Americans just how important Mr. Cooke was to Britons who needed or wanted to understand this vast and powerful place. But it’s also worth noting that Mr. Cooke was a brave exception to the BBC rule during the war to liberate Iraq. He understood what America experienced on September 11 and he never descended into the mire of knee-jerk anti-Americanism that consumed the BBC in the last few years. He did this as an old-fashioned FDR-style liberal.

Beneath his urbanity, you see, there was steel. He was a real idol to me in many ways. He came to America, as I did, on a Commonwealth Fund fellowship, was absorbed by the theater, as I was, and fell in love with America, as I did, while traveling across the entire country a year later.

Since I still cannot drive a car, I got a friend to drive me. My friend had been a chorister at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a tour guide at the university to earn some cash in the vacations. He was a charmer, and after many tours, American tourists would give him their card and tell him to look them up if he were ever in Tulsa, or wherever. I don’t think they ever really expected him to take them up on the offer. But we did. We rented a car, and called people from pay phones outside various cities and sometimes stayed the night. My friend would often literally sing for his supper, slipping into a little Byrd after dinner, while I sheepishly offered a few jokes. By this method — and various Motel Sixes — we drove from Miami to Los Angeles, and from there to Seattle and back through the heartland to Boston. What a way to learn about a country!

It ensured, in part, that it was the people of America I fell in love with, not just the breathtaking beauty of the place. But I digress. Mr. Cooke was a master of his form; and his extraordinary consistency and reliability were models for would-be foreign correspondents everywhere. Except he wasn’t finally a foreign correspondent. On the 15th floor in New York City, with a changed name and a new accent, he was finally home. I know how he felt.

Poseur alert

“That lapidary aperçu is perhaps the most valuable lesson buried inside this biography of the young middle-class woman who became famous as the Hollywood Madam after her 1993 arrest.

“Jamie-Lynn DiScala (Meadow on ’The Sopranos’) interprets the role of the 27-year-old brothel owner with coy vacancy, and her flat affect seems part of a broader postmodern approach to the material. ’Call Me’ is less a made-for-television movie than an extension of the 50’s French nouveau roman; Fleiss’s immorality tale is told without almost any conventional elements like dramatic plotting, moral precepts or psychological insight. And like the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is more interesting in theory than in practice.” — Alessandra Stanley, in the New York Times.

Quote of the week

“I never lost sight of the meaning that I have, or would have. And that’s why ultimately we have to treat good publicity and bad publicity as being exactly the same. You can’t let the good go to your head, because therefore you must — if you are being true to yourself — you must believe the bad. So consequently I don’t believe anything. Which is very confusing on Thursday nights.” — 1980s pop-icon Morrissey in the latest GQ.