The Weekly Dish

Re-branding Kerry

The first signs of intelligent life on planet Kerry were sighted this week, as he lay out an agenda to restrain public spending. Junking almost all his left-liberal primary rhetoric, he essentially promised a return to the Clinton era. Pegging the growth rate of 20 percent of spending at the rate of inflation, and promising a return to pay-as-you-go spending rules (abandoned by Republicans in 2002), amounts to an extremely smart bid to win independent voters over. There is no honest conservative defense of president Bush’s fiscal record, especially on spending. But now there’s a real neo-liberal alternative. Who would have thought it? If you want to restrain the size of government, voting for the Democrat this fall might be a better call — especially if the Republicans control Congress. Gridlock can be good.

Track-record watch

“What I fault the Bush administration for is its semitheological and semidemagogic concentration on terror as the central defining phenomenon of our time.” — Zbigniew Brzezinski, Newsweek magazine, April 12.

“The conclusion from several studies done in the intelligence community is that we should be careful not to overgeneralize from the Iranian case. Islamic revivalist movements are not sweeping the Middle East and are not likely to be the wave of the future. The foreign policy consequences of this strengthening of Islamic sentiment are mixed. It is more difficult to resolve the Arab-Israeli disputes; moreover, conservative Muslims are often xenophobic. If we emphasize moral as well as material values, our support for diversity, and a commitment to social justice, our dialogue with the Muslim world will be helped.” — Zbigniew Brzezinski, February 2, 1979, weekly report to President Jimmy Carter on the topic of “Islamic Fundamentalism.”

Clinton on Rwanda

It was worth reading Bill Clinton’s op-ed in The Washington Post this week. It was worth reading because it’s a fantastic example of how the man can take responsibility and yet not take responsibility. If this was a genocide that he personally failed to respond to as president of the United States (just as he ignored as long as he could the genocide in Bosnia), isn’t the right response some kind of breast-beating that isn’t quite this glib or weirdly upbeat? Money quote:

“We must never forget the past, but we must also never fail to meet our own responsibility to help create a brighter Rwandan future.”

Oy. What about his personal responsibility for the past? Huh? And couldn’t he have avoided a pitch for his own AIDS organization (however worthy it is)? After all, Mr. Clinton did much less than Mr. Bush has in Africa on AIDS, and he had the chance to really do some good while there was still time. The other day, he said something similar about his support for the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. He has rationalized his coldly political decision now as merely about protecting the rights of states to decide marriage rights. Only half true.

The rest of DOMA forbade the federal government from providing any federal recognition for homosexual couples at all. And Mr. Clinton signed it. And now he side-steps responsibility for what he did. It just took me five minutes to get angry at the guy all over again. How can someone enable a genocide and attack civil rights and still stand up for applause? I guess it’s called chutzpah.

He’s just straight

Brit soccer superstar, David Beckham, is reeling under a tabloid assault in London. An icon is toppled, or at least wobbled a little. And how have the mighty fallen under the onslaught of British journalism’s notorious cruelty: “The just-gay-enough metrosexual hipster, the uxorious one, the guy who tattooed his baby son’s name on to his back in Gothic script … suddenly he looked like every nylon-shirted commercial traveller sleeping with a drunk stranger in a motorway services hotel on a three-day break from his wife.” Ouch. And that was from the relatively high-brow Daily Telegraph.

Derbyshire nominee

“It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. Robert C. Byrd, in my view, would have been right at any time. He would have been right at the founding of this country. He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of Civil War in this nation.

“He would have been right at the great moments of international threat we faced in the 20th century. I cannot think of a single moment in this nation’s 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country. Certainly today that is not any less true.” — Sen. Chris Dodd, hailing former Klan member and active anti-homosexual bigot, Robert Byrd, on the floor of the Senate. Mr. Byrd would have been perfect during the Civil War? How much do you bet that Mr. Dodd’s remarks will get one smidgen of the media attention Trent Lott’s hailing of Strom Thurmond did?

Poseur alert

“The value of listening to Brion’s score by itself — with the exception of his thematically tongue-in-cheek ’Strings That Tie to You’ — is situated in the potency of its corresponding visual nostalgia. This seems to be the logical fate of most film scores, but in the case of Eternal Sunshine, Brion’s insistence on certain themes popping in and out of his textures seems particularly appropriate, as the soundtrack’s fluid matrix performatizes the cinematography’s mind/body collapse: In the film, Brion’s organi-synthgaze postlude ’Phone Calls’ plays after Joel decides not to try and save his first memory of Clementine, but just to enjoy it. Here, Brion’s score meets Eternal Sunshine’s oculophilia halfway, and fittingly comprises one of the film’s most potent scenes.” — Nick Sylvester, Pitchforkmedia.com.