Thanks to Michael for saying I’m a nice guy. I try to be–or at least, I try to put things in a way that suggests I won’t respond to opposition by jeering or throwing a fit.

Speaking of how well things are put, Michael also links (approvingly, I assume) to this post by Andrew Sullivan about the Mark Foley flap. Maybe I’m being too picky, but I find his choice of words troubling:

Equally, the news about Mark Foley has a kind of grim inevitability to it. I don’t know Foley, although, like any other gay man in D.C., I was told he was gay, closeted, afraid and therefore also screwed up. What the closet does to people – the hypocrisies it fosters, the pathologies it breeds – is brutal.

…

What I do know is that the closet corrupts. The lies it requires and the compartmentalization it demands can lead people to places they never truly wanted to go, and for which they have to take ultimate responsibility.

That last clause is a little jarring for me, coming as it does at the tail end of an explanation of all the ways closeted gays end up as they do because they’re buffeted by circumstance. Talking about what “the closet” does in the active voice–as if it were some kind of independent baleful force–can be rhetorically effective, but the flip side is that it makes closeted gays sound helpless and passive.

It’s still not clear what Foley’s situation is, but let’s assume he’s gay. Well, he was in his twenties in the ’70s, not the ’50s. Even considering all the ways coming out has become easier in the subsequent three decades, he had options. The only thing that makes his current pickle “inevitable” or a place he may have “never truly wanted to go” (exquisite euphemism, that) is that he kept making the same unwise choices. I’d bet that plenty of embezzlers could say honestly that they didn’t really want to steal from anyone. They just wanted a bunch of money they hadn’t earned and…well, you know.

Abe’s cabinet line-up was publicized on Tuesday. The Japan Times has an English list attached to its article on the announcement that unfortunately doesn’t contain the brief biographies from the print edition. Different commentators have different prognostications to offer, as always, but most agree that what will be most important to pay attention to is how the Abe government decides to prioritize and compromise. The cabinet members and advisors who are personal allies of his are almost uniformly hard-right in their public positions, but much of the rest of the LDP isn’t. Besides, some of Abe’s policy goals are, on their face, at odds with each other. (I’ll be interested to see how he manages to repair relations with China while also scotching its plans to become the preeminent regional economic and political power and increasing Japan’s military autonomy.)

Speaking of which, Abe has not stated one way or another whether he plans to visit the Yasukuni Shrine as prime minister. He was, however, questioned about it this morning:

The first questioner from the Democratic Party of Japan was party leader Yukio Hatoyama, who raised the point that the prime minister is coordinating visits to the PRC and ROK without having stated clearly whether he will make pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine. Hatoyama criticized the prime minister: “This is going to turn into Jun’ichiro Koizumi, the Second Act–losing trust [from China and Korea] through evasive maneuvers.”

Touching on the prime minister’s [previous] argument that “thinking that requires separating Class-A war criminals from others is off-target,” Hatoyama pressed him: “Just where does responsibility lie?”

The second act part is originally 二の舞 (ni no mai: “second dance”), usually used when you fail in the same way as someone else by making the same dumb mistakes. Abe is, if anything, more combative about the Yasukuni issue than his predecessor was. Koizumi’s line was, to the extent that one could get meaning from it, that it was possible to pay respect to those who’d served Japan in good faith while leaving the malefactors to whatever reward/retribution had been served to them in the next life.