Thursday, June 14, 2007

14 Jun 2007 04:15 pm

Go To College ...

... and get religion. Chad Orzel examines a new study of 10,000 students and concludes:

Clearly, militant atheists need to spend less time on education, and more time on the critical task of getting college students stoned and laid.

I'm more interested in why pot, booze and sex would weaken one's religious faith. All three have only validated mine.

14 Jun 2007 04:09 pm

Face of the Day

Sophia Folkesson, a BA Honours student at the Edinburgh College of Art, lays down on her art installation of a floor covered in human hair on June 15, 2007 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The works of over 400 students across 23 art, design and architecture departmentare on display throughout the college. By Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.

14 Jun 2007 04:01 pm

Seersucker Thursday

Trent Lott's strange enthusiasm.

14 Jun 2007 03:59 pm

In Defense of Coulter

Mark Kleiman goes there.

14 Jun 2007 03:42 pm

Iraq and Gaza, Ctd

Readers have offered their own take on why we can afford to allow an Islamist terror state emerge in Gaza but not in Iraq:

The glaring difference is, we created this problem in Iraq but we did not create the problem in Gaza. By irresponsibly removing Saddam we let loose violent factions. Certainly we have some responsibility to the people of Iraq.

Er, yes. But that logic means that the occupation of Iraq is completely self-perpetuating: The worse things get the more we are obliged to stay. And the longer we stay the worse things get. Wonderful, no? Being trapped in Iraq, moreover, has clearly prevented us from tackling Iran with any traction. One argument commonly made for staying in Iraq makes no sense to me at all. It's McCain's "if we leave, they will follow us home." But if we stay, they can follow us home as well. And by staying, we have clearly created more of them to follow us. The second argument that fails to convince is that by leaving, we give al Qaeda a propaganda coup. Yes, we would, and it would be intellectually dishonest to deny that. Any argument for withdrawal needs to take that into account. But by staying and losing, we also give al Qaeda a propaganda coup. And by constantly giving al Qaeda an anti-imperial narrative, we also prevent Muslims and Arabs from recognizing them for what they are: not anti-imperial liberators but theo-fascists.

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that if we want to win this long war, we have to leave Iraq. Sooner rather than later.

14 Jun 2007 03:38 pm

Another GI's Guide To Iraq

After that insightful gem from 1943, here's another U.S. military guide to Iraq in 2003. This line is priceless:

Arabs, by American standards, are reluctant to accept responsibility.

You think?
 

14 Jun 2007 03:04 pm

Hitch and God

A reader writes:

I do love Hitch - I think he's one of the best zinger men since Tynan, etc. But it will be interesting if thoughts of sobriety eventually creep in, as they sometimes will. His calling AA a quasi-cult in VF still rankles. His right, of course, certainly. But once the Hemingway-style high life begins to pall, I do hope he can find the humility to consider the idea of a higher power. As it says in Appendix II of Alcoholics Anonymous (aka the Big Book), which addresses the sometimes slow awakening of spirituality:

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation," – Herbert Spencer.

A line in John Updike's Rabbit Redux always makes me think of AA, though the character was speaking of something else entirely: "It is where God is pushing through."

My own position with friends is to accept them totally, or not be friends. I have no desire for Hitch to be anything other than completely himself, and if that includes a fondness of whiskey, more power to him. I have no desire to change him in any way. His fearless brilliance, astonishingly wide reading and great wit are treasures to me and a lot of others. And my own sense from being friends with him for over two decades is that, deep down, his impulse is less hostile to God than to organized religion. He's an anti-clericalist in a long British tradition. Besides, I'm also not in a mood to lambaste atheists these days. I disagree with them, as my long dialogue with Sam Harris testifies. But given the extremes that organized reigion has recently embraced, especially in Islam but to a lesser extent in Christian fundamentalism, there's a reason for an atheist revival. Whatever point anti-theists want to make has been more than eloquently made for them these past few years by the idiocy of so many "believers."

14 Jun 2007 02:50 pm

Iran's New Terror Base

Here's Charles Krauthammer:

This is the beginning of the Palestinian civil war. Round one happened this week, and it's over. Hamas has won in Gaza, it will take it over. And it is the worst elements.

As one high administration official said the other day, these are the extreme elements of the extremists. And this is essentially the first Palestinian independent territory — Israel is out of Gaza — and it will now become a terrorist state.

And it will also be, this is extremely important, a client of Iran. Hamas is supplied and financed by Iran.

And we do what? Invade? Or deal with it from a distance? If we can do the latter with Gaza, why not Anbar? Anbar, after all, is full of Sunni terrorists who would presumably counter the Shia terrorists. Doesn't that make leaving Anbar less dangerous than staying out of Gaza? Just asking.

14 Jun 2007 02:34 pm

How The Nazis Defended "Enhanced Interrogation"

Hint: the ticking time-bomb exception, and the need for better intelligence about an insurgency - the same defense as the GOP establishment has used for exactly the same techniques - hypothermia, stress positions, sensory deprivation, etc. - in the US and Iraq. The terms and specific methods used are the same for the Gestapo's "Verschaerfte Vernehmung," "Third Degree," and Bush's "enhanced interrogation." Of course, we also learn from the documents that

The GESTAPO in general believed that other methods of interrogation, such as playing off political factions against each other, were much more effective than third degree methods.

So Bush has more faith in torture than the Gestapo did. A reader writes:

I read with great interest your 19 May post about the Gestapo directive concerning "enhanced interrogation techniques". I gather that you found the document through a 1948 Norway trial. However, the same directive seems to have also been in evidence at Nuremberg (though there the Tribunal apparently translated the term as "the Third Degree"). At Nuremberg it was used as part of the case against the Gestapo in seeking to have the Gestapo declared to be a criminal organization by the Tribunal.

Interestingly, a report was filed in the Nuremberg proceedings in which a Colonel Neave, acting under Commission from the Tribunal, reported the evidence of witnesses for the defense of the organizations. It is this report that draws the direct line back to the "ticking bomb exception".

The passage that sets out the Gestapo's defense of the "Third Degree" measures and authorization is as follows (pp. 55-56):

"V. DEFENSE OF THE GESTAPO AGAINST CHARGES OF BRUTALITY AND THIRD DEGREE INTERROGATIONS

BEST said that he preferred to describe the so-called "third degree interrogations" as "severe interrogations". He did not hear of the decree which authorized this type of interrogation until sometime after it had been issued and he had once told HEYDRICH his scruples concerning it. HEYDRICH informed him that the measure had been approved by very high authority and similar methods were used in other countries.

Continue reading "How The Nazis Defended "Enhanced Interrogation"" »

14 Jun 2007 02:18 pm

Another Hitch Counter-Blast

From Sam Schulman in Commentary.

14 Jun 2007 01:35 pm

Victory!

Confirmed. A reader notes:

Think about that. The final vote was 151 to 45. Gay marriage opponents couldn't even get 25% of state legislators to support their amendment. That's not a sea change in public opinion, that's a tidal wave.

I expect the social right to argue that only a referendum confirms democratic legitimacy on marriage equality. I'd have been happy to win such a referendum and think we could in Massachusetts. But it is a very strange idea that over 75 percent of an elected legislature does not represent democratic legitimacy. Now: let the legislature have its way in California.

14 Jun 2007 01:35 pm

Love Letters For Libby

The Washington establishment rushes to protect one of its own from the consequences of perjury. Here's the PDF of all the Beltwayers' letters to the judge, demanding superior legal treatment for one of their friends. Enjoy, and if you find a particularly excruciating diamond in the rough, let me know.

14 Jun 2007 01:25 pm

Marriage Equality In Massachusetts

The reports are sketchy but I just got word that the amendment to put civil marriage equality to a referendum next year has just been defeated 151 - 45 in the Massachusetts legislature. That means marriage rights for gay couples are here to stay in America. It means a historic victory for civil rights. Stay tuned for updates.

14 Jun 2007 01:18 pm

Romney, Faith and the Jews

Not an auspicious attempt at ecumenism. His list of religious allies may not have any only have one Jew on it but it includes many Christianists and others deeply hostile to gay dignity and equality.

14 Jun 2007 12:39 pm

Giuliani's Iraq Policy

He has none right now. It's "in the hands of other people." More specifically:

"What I was trying to do was to look at the things, as best as you can predict it now, that are going to be there a year and a half from now. Iraq may get better; Iraq may get worse. We may be successful in Iraq; we may not be. I don’t know the answer to that. That’s in the hands of other people. But what we do know for sure is the terrorists are going to be at war with us a year, a year and a half from now."

So how does Iraq play into the broader struggle against Islamist terror? Has it helped or hurt? Where should we go from here? The country is at a vital cross-roads in this war and the GOP front-runner has no contribution to make as to what we should do. Romney and Thompson are just as vague. McCain and Paul are the only ones with the integrity and courage to speak to our moment. And that's why they are currently the only Republican candidates worthy of any respect.

14 Jun 2007 12:11 pm

Iraq and Gaza

I mentioned this obvious parallel yesterday, wondering why Glenn Reynolds doesn't favor U.S. or allied occupation or re-occupation of the place. Glenn favors indefinite U.S. occupation of Iraq to prevent a terror-state emerging in the chaos we helped unleash there. So why is he happy to allow Gaza to become a terror-state without our military intervention? Isn't the threat to the West the same - or maybe worse? Glenn responds by asserting that my point is a "mindless snark." He says

It's not like we invaded Iraq for these reasons, after all.

Well: no shit, Sherlock. But this leads to an obvious further question: why did we invade Iraq four years ago?

A gentle reminder: We did not invade Iraq to police a sectarian civil war for ever. We did not invade Iraq to permanently prevent an al Qaeda presence there with our troops. We invaded to remove what we were told were stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and to pre-empt the development of nuclear weaponry, because, after 9/11, we decided not to take the risk of Sddam handing over such weapons to Qaeda or Qaeda-style terrorists. Removing a brutal tyranny and creating a space for democratic life were secondary and tertiary reasons, and were designed to defuse the logic of Islamism in the Middle East. I agreed with all three rationales.

But, ahem, what are we doing there now? We discovered that the WMD issue was a chimera or a lie. We removed and had Shiite goons execute the dictator. We tried to construct a constitutional order for a non-dictatorial, national political settlement. History will judge whether the subsequent disaster was a function of a hard task screwed up or an impossible task screwed up. But right now, we have done all we wanted to originally accomplish, except, of course, anything close to a stable state. So what is the rationale for staying?

According to the Republican candidates, it is because leaving would make matters worse (even Rudy Giuliani isn't foolish enough to repeat the democracy objective). How worse? The emergence of a failed state where al Qaeda and other Islamist mass-murderers could regroup and thrive. Well ... now look at Gaza.

Continue reading "Iraq and Gaza" »

14 Jun 2007 12:06 pm

The View From Your Window

Bergen, Norway, 11.45 pm.

For an interactive gallery of Dish readers' window views across the world, click here.

14 Jun 2007 11:36 am

Christianism Watch

A new low: judging a candidate by the frequency with which he attends church. One Christianist even demands to know if Fred Thompson has ""Taught a Bible class, Presided at the Lord's table, Served as a greeter, Or led singing." Hey, this is today's GOP.

14 Jun 2007 11:11 am

Bush's Watch In Albania

Well, your lying eyes could still be wrong, I guess. I hadn't seen the second YouTube before I posted the reader's email.

14 Jun 2007 10:41 am

The Lies Of Kevin Madden

Romney's spokesman seems to be suggesting he'll maintaining the truthy standards of the Bush administration.

14 Jun 2007 10:25 am

A Democrat For Ron Paul

The rationale:

I don't want to see another Republican President any more than the next Democrat. But I do want to see a Republican nominee who stands up for civil rights, who speaks sensibly about America's place in the world, who insists on the rule of law and rejects the exceptionalism and emergency powers advocated by every other GOP candidate. I want to see the Republican party rally around a voice that is not encouraging them to tear apart the Constitution in fear of terrorism. I want to see a Republican nominee who will enable the American people to experience a campaign of hope and ideas, not of fear and McCarthyism.

14 Jun 2007 09:52 am

America As A Monopoly

A reader writes:

You asked:

"How did we get so much dumber in fifty years? And, yes, I am not exempting myself from this assessment. I guess we panicked, didn't we?"

Hogwash. Pearl Harbor wasn't cause for panic? Or the fact that the Nazis had taken over most of Europe? Or that Communism was seen as a viable alternative to liberal democracy in many parts of the world?

The difference, Andrew, is that in 1943 there were still serious ideological and strategic competitors to liberal democracy and the United States. To succeed against these enemies it required a national mobilization and the application of America's best minds to the cause of winning the war and the Cold War that followed. Competition of this type necessarily forces a great power like the United States to be smarter and more rational when it uses military power or, in Darwinian fashion, it will be selected out of the international system.

Fascism and Communism were terrible things, but competition with these systems forced us to be better, smarter, and tougher. A side effect of our current military hegemony is that we have become something of a lazy monopolist. We demand more from our allies and give up less in return. We are free to indulge in ideological fantasies and engage in self-delusion because there is no real competitor out there to take advantage when we do so. We become arrogant because, like all monopolists, we can't imagine our monopoly ever being taken away from us.

Mass-murder in the middle of New York City didn't help either.

14 Jun 2007 09:33 am

Interviewing Fred Thompson

Rarely have I sat through fourteen minutes of an interview and learned less about a major candidate. But check it out for yourself. Here he is on Iraq:

"We must take every opportunity that we have and to exhaust every reasonable hope we have to not lose that."

On taxes, I'm with him. But he has no proposals to cut entitlement spending to the degree that we must to keep taxes low. He says Goldwater is his idol. So why isn't Bush his nemesis? No one has destroyed Goldwater's legacy as effectively as Bush has. Thompson seems charming if you need someone to while away a long evening - and you'll have to remind him of what's recently been in the news. But he also seems bored. And remarkably free of any specific ideas to run on.

14 Jun 2007 08:13 am

The Greatness of God

A brutal counter-blast against Hitch's best-selling anti-theist screed appears in the new "Commonweal". Money quote:

Hitchens's claim that the God of Moses "never mentions human solidarity and compassion at all" is preposterous, given the Torah's injunctions about forgiveness of debts, redistribution of land, or openness to strangers, or the prophets' exhortations to mercy, justice, and beating swords into ploughshares. He rightly contends that the crimes of Nazism and Communism do not mitigate the felonies of religion; indeed, he writes, "one might hope that religion had retained more sense of its dignity than that." True, but that sense of dignity is inseparable from standards by which the religious can identify and condemn atrocities done in their name - standards that fascists and Stalinists never recognized, let alone applied.

Doctrines of racial purity lead inexorably to repression, ethnic cleansing, or genocide; acceptance of "historical necessity" inevitably sanctions "the necessary murder," as Auden later regretted putting it. There is nothing even remotely comparable in these secular ideologies to the command to love one’s enemies. Those Christians down the ages who tried to prevent the crimes of their horrifically errant brethren did so because they believed - often at the cost of their lives or fortunes - that the human person was the imago Dei, a conviction they derived from Christian theology.

I haven't yet read the book, but I hope Hitch did not merely dismiss Augustine as "a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus."

14 Jun 2007 07:53 am

A Short History of Bad Psychotherapy

Ten reasons to appreciate Zoloft.

14 Jun 2007 05:57 am

CrazyOldCoots.com, Ctd

A reader dug up what would surely be Abraham Simpson's acceptance speech were he to do us all a favor and run for president. He certainly seems more clued in to current events than, say, Fred Thompson. The Onion would have to endorse, I suspect:

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

13 Jun 2007 08:57 pm

The "Threat" of Democracy

The realists are striking back against the president's war for democracy and against Islamism. Is he pursuing a complete contradiction? Long-term, you can see the logic in principle. In the short run, in the actual Middle East, Jim Baker's prejudice in favor of "consensual authoritarianism" seem to have the weight of the recent evidence behind it:

The reason democracy is losing the competition is that consensual authoritarianism produces security for its peoples, and exports security to its neighbors and the world.  We musn't be blind to these facts: these regimes cooperate with the world in combating terrorism and containing an aggressive Iran, they have peace treaties with Israel or float peace initiatives, they don't threaten or intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, and they don't seek weapons of mass destruction. None of them has gone to war in the last thirty-plus years.

And who are the net exporters of insecurity? These are states that have multi-polar or pluralistic systems: Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and what some call Palestine. These systems aren't democracies, but in terms of formal practices like elections, they've actually gone the longer distance. Yet they don't provide security for their peoples, and they export insecurity, in the form of terrorism, refugees, radical Islam, and nuclear threats.  What's discouraging is that this isn't true in only some of the cases, or only half of them. It's true, for now, in all if them.

By fostering radical insecurity as well as a formal democratic process in Iraq, we may well have poisoned its reputation for the foreseeable future. And, alas, no Gersonian rhetoric from the president will undo the chaos Rumsfeld deliberately created. In simpler terms:

Baghdad is not Bonn, Beirut is not Warsaw, and Tehran is not Prague.

Burke would understand.

13 Jun 2007 08:11 pm

Bush Or Your Lying Eyes?

A reader writes:

The ease with which the Bush administration generally, and its spokespeople in particular, lies still manages to astonish me, even after six and a half years. Take a look at this story from Reuters about the theft of Bush's watch in Albania:

Albanian police say the reports of President Bush's watch being stolen while greeting the crowd in Tirana are untrue. However, video from the presidential visit shows that while he began to work the crowd with a timepiece on his left arm, within seconds it was gone. "The story is untrue and the president did not lose his watch," a spokesman for the embassy in Tirana said.

The article is accompanied by footage clearly showing that the watch was stolen, yet a spokesman for the U.S. embassy echoed the statements of the Albanian police (who are clearly embarrassed by the episode).

I don't know which possibility is most frightening: 1) that the administration has so little respect for the intelligence of the American public that it thinks it can get away with saying literally anything, no matter how untrue, and no matter how strong the evidence against it; 2) that the administration knows that 70% of the American public won't believe them, but only cares about the 30% that will believe them; or 3) that the administration actually believes its own lies.

Personally, I think it's all three:  they started out believing their own lies, then moved on to thinking that they could say anything whether it was true or not, and have now reached the point where they only care about the 30% of the American public who will always believe whatever they say.

13 Jun 2007 07:49 pm

Throw-Away Line Of the Day

"Mr. Lago is the mayor of this scenic Swedish town of 60,000 people [Sodertalje], which last year took in twice as many Iraqi refugees as the entire United States..." - NYT today. Hey, since his college days, someone else has always had to clean up after Bush's messes.

13 Jun 2007 06:47 pm

Blair and the Beast

My media contacts in Britain have all had a cow about Tony Blair's Al Gore impersonation this week. The prime minister began his premiership by slavishly sucking up to the media, creating the world's biggest spin operation, and subsequently didn't like it when a few saw through the blather. The Blair government is also knee-deep in corporate sleaze, something not so well known among Blair's American fans. Simon Jenkins lets it rip today on Blair's anti-media chutzpah, in a review of the latest corruption scandal:

As the onion skins peel back, al-Yamamah emerges as not a defence contract at all but a vehicle for financial "skimming" by rich Saudis (and Britons such as Mark Thatcher). While British governments could argue that before the 1998 convention such payments were legal, that has not been so since and they were specifically outlawed in 2001. Whitehall has been complicit in a colossal, secret and illegal act of bribery to win a grossly inflated contract. That is why Goldsmith had to suppress the SFO inquiry and why BAE dare not let Lord Woolf near the stinking trough. And Blair has the gall to call the press cynical.

I like Blair, but I haven't had to live with him this past decade. My own view is that Enoch Powell was right: politicians who complain about the press are like sailors complaining about the weather.

13 Jun 2007 06:08 pm

"You're Not Big-Boned"

James Joyner sees the sense in tough love for fat kids. Megan McArdle isn't buying all the obesity hype.

13 Jun 2007 05:43 pm

Obamagirl

Marc Ambinder creates a fake anti-Obama ad in order to help Obama refute a looming smear. Others, meanwhile, are making freelance Obama ads as well. I swear I have nothing to do with this one:

A reader adds:

Somewhere in America, Ron Paul Girl is finishing up her video, which centers around the gold standard.

And somewhere in America, K-Lo is dusting off her Romney lyrics. Eww.

13 Jun 2007 05:04 pm

The Tennessee Vessel

The blogosphere tries to figure out Fred Thompson. I'm not convinced there's anything to figure out. The Hill editorializes:

There comes a point, and Thompson has surely just about reached it, when a candidate needs take the plunge or look indecisive and unserious. Buzz is wonderful, but it's like an automobile — it cannot run on fumes indefinitely.

Joe Gandelman worries that Thompson is not planning to appeal to independents. Chris Cillizza sees him as an empty vessel for thwarted Republican dreams:

Need evidence? Just 4 percent of Republican primary voters in the L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll said they would not vote for Thompson under any circumstances. Compare that with the 22 percent who said they could never support McCain and the 12 percent who said it would be impossible for them to back Romney.

Thompson also seems to be the unannounced Bush successor, if the Bush and Cheney dynasties are any indicator. I'm inclined to agree with Michael Stikcings that Romney is still, in the long run, a more plausible consensus figure for the GOP (despite evangelical anti-Mormon bigotry). It helps that Romney has no fixed beliefs or principles. What he'll need to win the nomination may have to be junked as soon as he gets it. For Romney: no sweat.

13 Jun 2007 04:38 pm

Face of the Day

A cicada sits on a twig in a forest preserve June 11, 2007 in Willow Springs, Illinois. The cicada is one of millions in the area that have emerged from the ground and taken to the trees during the past couple of weeks, part of a 17-year hatch cycle. By Scott Olson/Getty Images.

13 Jun 2007 04:32 pm

The Lies Of Tony Snow

Yes, they're lies - repeated and knowing recitation of an untruth:

Are you saying that detaining people who are plucked off the battlefields is an assault on democracy? Are you kidding me? You’re talking about the people who were responsible for supporting the Taliban, somehow detaining them is an assault on democracy?

Scott Horton reminds Snow of reality:

The battlefield that Al-Marri was "plucked off of" was an apartment complex in West Peoria, Illinois, where he had been living, under constant observation, for many months.

The battlefield is your living room. And King George can enter, arrest, and torture at any time. This, one recalls, is what the first Americans defined themselves as opposed to. Two centuries from freedom to despotism.

13 Jun 2007 04:26 pm

CrazyOldCoots.com

The latest from Mike Gravel:

Q: You left public office in 1981. Over the years, have you often wished to be back in the Senate?

Gravel: Only on the 11th of October, 2002, when the Senate approved the Iraq War resolution. I’d have filibustered that sucker and stuck it up their nose with a pitchfork.

Q: How come nobody did that?

A: No guts. No guts. No guts.

Q: Why?

A: No guts.

Can someone get Abe Simpson to run?

13 Jun 2007 04:10 pm

Strawberry Fields

A grim report from the annals of illegal immigration in America: an archived 1995 Atlantic story on the Californian strawberry-picking industry. Plus: a screed against scruffy, Latin-looking illegals - from 1896. Money quote:

The question today is not of preventing the wards of our almshouses, our insane asylums, and our jails from being stuffed to repletion by new arrivals from Europe; but of protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe.

And lepers everywhere! I tell you: the nineteenth century was one frigging amnesty after another. And the seventeenth century! We had no control of the borders whatsoever.

13 Jun 2007 04:04 pm

A Book Review Blog

The NYTBR gets with the program, and Clive approves. Congrats, Sam! Others in the blogosphere respond like the feral beasts we are. Grrrr.

13 Jun 2007 03:30 pm

A Guide To Iraq

Here's a stunning little find: from 1943 a guide to Iraq for GIs. Beyond poignant; and extremely wise. The PDF is here. Money quote:

You can usually tell a mosque by its high tower. Keep away from mosques. If you try to enter one, you will be thrown out, probably with a severe beating.

There are four towns in Iraq which are particularly sacred to the Iraq Moslems: Kerbala, Najaf, Samarra, and Kadhiman. Unless you are ordered to these towns it is advisable to stay away from them.

Moslems here are divided into two factions something like our division into Catholic and Protestant  denominations - so don't put in your two cents when Iraqis argue about religion.

There are political differences in Iraq that have puzzled diplomats and statesmen. You won't help matters any by getting mixed up in them.

How did we get so much dumber in fifty years? And, yes, I am not exempting myself from this assessment. I guess we panicked, didn't we?

13 Jun 2007 03:07 pm

Just Rounding Them Up

Der Spiegel seems to be the go-to place for accounts of the Bush administration's record of just arresting large numbers of random people, sending them off to be "interrogated" or subjected to the now-familiar Verschaerfte Vernehmung tactics (or much worse in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere). Money quote:

On Jan. 27, 2007, Saafia was flown to Mogadishu in Somalia on an African Express Airlines flight (flight number AXK527), along with 84 other "terror suspects," including several children.

US citizens were present at each of these stops, Saafia's husband Mounir Awad told SPIEGEL. "When we landed, we were immediately photographed by Americans in civilian clothing," he says, adding that he and the others were repeatedly insulted as "Qaeda bastards" ...

Well, they looked nasty, especially those "Qaeda bastard" children. And every enemy we have is a subset of al Qaeda, aren't they? Ask Rudy. Meanwhile, back on planet earth:

Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson estimates that the US administration has arrested between 30,000 and 50,000 suspects during the past year. Eighty-five percent of them were innocent, according to Wilkerson. "We really have created a mess here. A terrible mess," Wilkerson says. "This has been incredibly damaging."

13 Jun 2007 02:30 pm

Rorty, Rawls, Oakeshott, Neuhaus

The Damon Linker-Matt Yglesias conversation about the scope of "political liberalism" is worth a few moments. Start with Matt's latest post on the subject and read on back. I think Matt is right, by the way, although it's been a while since I read either Rawls or Rorty. Both agree on this fundamental piece of non-fundamentalism, as expressed by Matt:

The goal is to hive off an autonomous political domain in which we bracket our views on broader, deeper questions and engage one another on the basis of a much-shallower but more widely held set of views about the conception of a citizen.

When I was studying political theory at Harvard, this was the big debate. For my part, I do not see why one cannot strive both to maintain the possibility of Truth or Meaning (or even one's own private mastery of such), while treating political interaction in a liberal democracy as a necessarily shallower enterprise. But then, I think seeing politics as a lesser form of human activity is more conducive to traditional conservatives than to left-liberals. Oakeshott tackled all of this, more elegantly and more brilliantly, long before Rawls or Rorty (as Rorty belatedly saw). But Oakeshott was a "conservative" (boo! hiss!) and so ignored by most academics until the last few years.

Ross responds by arguing that Richard John Neuhaus and his theocon friends are only interested in persuasion and changing the culture, not using the levers of politics and the law to insist on their religious convictions. Please.

Continue reading "Rorty, Rawls, Oakeshott, Neuhaus" »

13 Jun 2007 01:52 pm

Quote for the Day

"I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer," - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet.

13 Jun 2007 01:23 pm

The View From Your Window

Terrebonne, Oregon, 5.45 pm.

For an interactive gallery of Dish readers' window views across the world, click here.

13 Jun 2007 01:10 pm

It's A Civil War

Glenn Reynolds is surely right that what is going on in the Palestinian territories is a civil war. What I don't understand is why he doesn't therefore support invading the place and occupying it indefinitely to curb the Islamist threat. I mean: al Qaeda and Islamists are gaining ground in Gaza and the West Bank. What are we waiting for?

13 Jun 2007 12:54 pm

That Opera Amateur

A reader writes:

Jeeez ... here it is 9 am and you can pour me into a fucking cup. I hope you keep us updated on what happens with that guy.

It really is a classic YouTube moment. If you missed it the first time, check it out.

13 Jun 2007 12:33 pm

The Unseriousness of the "Pro-War" Right

Is this truly the consensus on the Bush-Cheney right? Money quote:

Most Americans will not see a connection between the ideology of the head-drillers and head-loppers we are fighting in Iraq and those who try to do even worse at Fort Dix and the Kennedy airport.

How to unpack this? First off, it is not clear that we are in fact fighting all the head-loppers and head-drillers in Iraq. Many of the head-drillers are allies of the government we are supporting. Both the head-loppers and head-drillers have been empowered, not stymied, by our clueless occupation - and they have multiplied in numbers. And there are plenty of extremely unpleasant characters among the Sunni tribes we are now supporting to defeat a different strand of head-loppers in Anbar. Then one has to ask: is Hanson actually saying that the Shiite death squads and Qaeda wannabes in the Caribbean are part of the same movement? In the past, successful wars were often conducted under the aegis of "divide and conquer." The Bush policy, guided by the genius of strategists like Hanson, seems to be "unite a splintering enemy and lose to them."

Then there's this rubbish: "Do even worse" than what's happening in Iraq at Fort Dix and JFK? Is Hanson serious? Or has defending the indefensible finally forced him off the deep end?

Continue reading "The Unseriousness of the "Pro-War" Right" »

13 Jun 2007 11:49 am

Clinton, Obama, Negatives

Hers are a staggering 45 percent! Obama's only 21. Only Mr Reason is as loathed as Hillary - but not as much. As Isaac Chotiner observes:

Even if everyone who learns about Obama from this point forward grows to hate him (and we are talking about 30 percent of the country), his ratings will still be no worse than hers.

As another critic notes:

Hillary's history of prevarication, rigidity and quasi-divine sense of election is profoundly unsettling.

An understatement. If the Dems want to throw this auspicious moment away, they know what to do.

13 Jun 2007 11:17 am

"God Is A Big Jerk"

The Illustrated Hitchens.

13 Jun 2007 10:48 am

Inside Camille's Brain

I bet you it looks like her favorite YouTube:

The music, alas, is extremely lesbian.

13 Jun 2007 10:38 am

La Prima Paglia

Sorry, I can't help it. Like many non-lefty homos, I just can't get enough Camille (as enraged former New Republic readers in the 1990s will recall). Who else could scan the world and come up with this pet peeve:

Inert, over-enlarged, weight-trained hands and limp, dangling arms are my beef against our current crew of starlets - like Kirsten Dunst, who's appealing enough as an Angie Dickinson without the sizzle but whose klunky man-paws we've been forced to contemplate from "Marie Antoinette" through "Spider-Man 3."

Has Camille seen Madonna's hands lately?