Dan Savage emails me an email he just got from a reader of his advice column. Telling, I think:
I am a 31 year old gay male and have been with my 27 year old boyfriend for exactly one year. This year has been absolutely amazing and he has been everything I have ever wanted in a relationship. While everything has been fantastic, we have had some issues in our relationship that center around trust and communication. Our previous relationships failed for many reasons, primarily because of infidelity and being lied to. We have at times displayed a lack of trust for each other because of being hurt in the past. I am hoping to correct my lack of trust and communications issues through therapy and proving to him over time that I will never hurt him or cheat on him.
Where it gets complicated is that on our one year anniversary, he proposed to me. I told him that I thought it was too soon and that I felt I wanted to resolve any and all of the trust issues we have before committing to marriage. Needless to say he was hurt, said that he would get over it and would look to ask me again in a year. My question is, is it possible that I have caused irreparable damage to the relationship? Should I have said yes (as I do see myself marrying him some day) while committing to a long engagement? Is working these things out before marriage absolutely necessary?
Finally, we get to work through the same issues as heterosexuals. Finally, dating and relationships have a structure that helps order them, even if that structure is recognized in abeyance.
I don't think he'll be hiring John Yoo, or looking actively for new methods to justify torture, but if you think that any John Sidney McCain will let something like the letter of the law, or the constitutional separation of powers, prevent him from acting swiftly to defend America's interests (however he defines it), then you probably haven't been paying close attention.
Pace Holtz-Eakin, this issue is not of interest only to "the ACLU and trial lawyers"; pace McCain,
it is not an excuse for pointless recriminations about long-ago actions
that are irrelevant to "addressing the challenge we face today." As
we "move forward," there are few questions more important than whether
the president is bound to obey the law even when it conflicts with his
own ideas about how best to fight terrorism. If McCain cannot give a
straight answer to that question and stick to it, he does not deserve
the vote of anyone who believes in the rule of law and the separation
of powers.
Poulos thoughts on yesterday's Supreme Court ruling:
Gitmo is a hodgepodge of freaks, has-beens, brutes, and hapless extras. Some detainees ought to be there because of what they´ve done (enemy combatants). Some of them ought to be there because of who they are. But for every handful or so of those characters, there are random Uighurs and others who seem to be ´unreturnable´to their place of origin. Any commentary on Guantanamo has to start from this point of departure, I think.
But the real problem is the interminable detention period, which has no reasonable judicial excuse. The dissenters are quite right that America has offered a quite generous set of procedural protections for enemy combatants. But these are mocked when a detainee is an indefinite prisoner with indefinitely incomprehensible status. The problem is not the legal process but what happens when the federal government holds that process, at its whim, in open-ended abeyance.
There is nothing “excessive” about the word empire to describe the
political and military domination of other countries. Hegemony may
be slightly more precise, but the practical difference between hegemony
and empire is not very great when hegemony entails the establishment of
dozens of military bases on foreign soil. Perhaps people who believe
that Washington and Baghdad are merely negotiating a bilateral “status
of forces” agreement as between two equal, sovereign states also think
that the Batavian Republic
was a free and independent state that just had a very friendly
relationship with France. Oh, but that couldn’t have been
imperialism–France was democratic at the time! France and
the Batavian Republic also made a treaty, one that was quite
disadvantageous to the Dutch but a treaty all the same, so that
must have made the ensuing occupation all right.
If there is one good thing that might come out of the disaster of
the war in Iraq, it is that the absurd, excessive and naive faith that
democracies are never aggressive and imperialistic may be shaken at
least a little.
Ross's response to Carr's article and to Max Boot's dissent:
I've made a related argument in the context of blogs, arguing that the web is very good for certain forms of writing - the highly political and the highly personal chief among them - and very bad for others; by extension, I'd say that the web is very good for certain forms of book-writing (shorter forms on the one hand, and forms that require large amounts of research on the other ) and very bad for others (forms that require large amounts of serious reflection to write, and to read).
Hillary's concession happened to fall on the last Saturday of my show's between-seasons break. (I work on a prime time network crime drama.) During those five weeks off, I watched -- no, I bore into -- the primaries, my obsession rising according to the lengths she would go to reconstitute her imagined primacy. There was real tension, suspense, a built-in villain-you-love-to-hate, and a what-will-she-do-now cliffhanger.
Now, back in the office, standing by as episodes are cooked up in the writers room, I wonder: can our little fictional hour, even with the liberty to go wherever it wants to, ever stand up against The Primary Show?
Mark Murray on the NBC poll that shows Obama leading McCain 47 - 41:
Bush never trailed Kerry in the 2004 NBC/WSJ polls that measured registered voters' preference for Bush, Kerry, and Nader. And Bush's lead was never bigger than four points.
By popular demand (and re-posted here): Ambers and I talk post-primary politics: how important is the Jim Johnson story? Does McCain care about the troops? How well does Rahm Emanuel speak for Obama? How smart in the end is McCain?
"Obama probably could have phrased it differently. But isn’t the current price spike the greatest non-regulatory impetus to developing alternative energy sources we’ve seen so far? Sure beats carbon taxes and complicated cap and trade systems," - Jennifer Rubin.
“Borders bookshop has a “Real Lives” section. Waterstones ups the ante with “Painful Lives”. Amazon’s catch-all is the more enigmatic “True Endurance and Survival”. But earlier this week I found myself in the “Tragic Life Stories” aisle of WHSmiths. After taking in that, yes, a whole section of shelving had actually been given over to this subject, it struck me that while each book pertained to be a traumatic tale of an individual, they were marketed in such a way as to look entirely the same. Unlike the covers within the nearby Crime section, where even the most conventional might feature a gun, a knife, or something vaguely noir-ish; within Tragic Life Stories there is, apparently, no need to differentiate details. Each one is a tragic tale; each one has the same cover: a child’s face and a scrawled, handwritten title.”
Back when I lived in Washington DC, the Congressional candidate whose campaign I worked on explained that in politics you meet so many people you never say "Nice to meet you" when working a crowd. Odds are you'll say that to someone you had previously met, but don't recognize, and they'll feel insulted. Instead, you say "Nice to see you," because that covers both the folks you're meeting for the first time and those you've met before.
This is good advice. Some time ago, I was lucky enough to be able to have a chat with secretary of state Condi Rice. "Good morning, madam secretary. So good to meet you," I ventured. "Actually we have met before," she responded. Which is why she's secretary of state and I'm an addled blogger.
Yet, we wanted Iraq to be a part of our sphere of influence in the Middle East, an outcome that could only happen if we had a compliant regime in Baghdad. So we were hoping that we could ‘liberate’ Iraq, and promote fair elections to create a new government that would be a military and economic ally of the United States.
The breakdowns in this logic were the assumptions that (1) the inevitable Shiite government would be able to control the seething sectarian tensions that had been building for years, and (2) that the Shiite government would be concerned about US long-term interests. The result: Yes, we have influence in Iraq and even cooperation from the Iraqi government, but these results are due to the presence of the US military.
Yes it is ‘empire’, not the 19th-century form of empire with a docile populace in awe of modernity; rather it’s a 21st-century form of empire where the internet reveals to all the devil’s bargain we have made with the Iraqi government.
Goldberg experimented with brain scanning for his article in the current Atlantic. A snippet:
Bin Laden, I was pleased to learn, stimulated predictably negative brain activity, but the neuroscientists were flummoxed by my reaction to the sight of Ahmadinejad, who apparently stimulated, in a most dramatic way, my ventral striatum. “Reward!” Iacoboni said. “You’ll have to explain this one.”
Don’t know if you know this or not, but those aren’t just any two geezers. Marcia Nasatir is something of a legend in the film biz, the first woman to become a studio executive back in the 1970s, and as a producer, the driving force behind such movies as The Big Chill. (I used to work for her many years ago and she’s just a great person and, as you can tell from the Geezers video, highly intelligent AND down to earth.) Lorenzo Semple is a well-known screenwriter, the man who adapted Three Days of the Condor for the big screen and also wrote the live action Batman movie in the 1960s, among many other credits.
Nice of you to give them some love on your blog. I think they’re awesome, too.
Another adds:
There's already a political talk show featuring a bunch of opinionated old codgers. It's called "The McLaughlin Group".
...the real issue of how U.S. government policy should be impacted by moral universalism is a practical problem. In the wake of Iraq, few people around the world think "America is sovereign, and also can invade other countries whenever it wants to, but other countries can't do that" is a viable governing principle for the world order. So insofar as people would like to see certain international norms enforced, actual work needs to be done to make that possible.
Meanwhile, it's always worth resisting this impulse to identify humanitarianism with the cause of invasions. Being open to immigration and imported goods helps foreigners, costs us nothing, and tends to advance the cause of peace. Preserving good relations between the great powers has major humanitarian benefits as the post-cold war decline in global conflict continues apace. Programs to hand out mosquito nets help people. It's a kind of madness to assume that military coercion is the be-all and end-all of human betterment.
A supporter of the German team watches the UEFA Euro 2008 Group B match between Croatia and Germany at a public viewing area on June 12, 2008 in Frankfurt, Germany. By Ralph Orlowski/Getty Images.
I'm of course gratified to see further evidence confirming my
hypothesis, but it's a melancholy sense of gratification since the
hypothesis is (to me, anyway) such an unhappy one. There should be a
word to describe the feeling of finding support for one's gloomy idea.
The U.S. government has photographic evidence that a Guantanamo Bay inmate was tortured with a knife after being taken to Morocco by U.S. forces, a British human rights group said Tuesday.
Reprieve said their client, Binyam Mohamed, had his genitals slashed repeatedly with a doctor's scalpel while in custody in Morocco after he was flown there from Pakistan by American officials in 2002. It also said his U.S. captors later took pictures of the abuse to show authorities that his wounds were healing.
According to John Yoo, slashing someone's genitals with a knife is not torture.
Your reader uses the
term "Chomsky-level rhetoric" specifically to duck the question. What nation
besides the United States feels that a mere "alliance" requires the presence of
50 bases in country?
And I might say it is Ferguson-level rhetoric as well. My old friend - with whom I've had a few chats about empire over the years - gets frustrated because America has an empire and won't run it properly. My longtime counter-point is that America just can't be an empire in the old sense, because it simply isn't in America's DNA. And because the age of empire is over - and should be over.
Three of the five Justices in the majority -- John Paul Stevens (age 88), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (age 75) and David Souter (age 68) -- are widely expected by court observers to retire or otherwise leave the Court in the first term of the next President. By contrast, the four judges who dissented -- Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Sam Alito -- are expected to stay right where they are for many years to come.
John McCain has identified Roberts and Alito as ideal justices of the type he would nominate, while Barack Obama has identified Stephen Breyer, David Souter and Ginsberg (all in the majority today). It's not hyperbole to say that, from Supreme Court appointments alone, our core constitutional protections could easily depend upon the outcome of the 2008 election.
Protecting us from unrestrained executive power, as the Founders wanted, is a very powerful reason to vote against a Republican who would appoint Justices who would simply get out of the way of what Michael Goldfarb has called a "near-dictatorial" presidency.
A right-wing Tory who is one of the party's leaders has resigned his seat in Parliament to protest the Brown government's successful bid to lengthen the amount of time the police can imprison terror suspects without charges. There is something very encouraging about this: and it's a reminder that conservatives are not all defined by the Bush administration's contempt for individual liberties, habeas corpus, fair trials and the ancient Anglo-American revulsion at torture. Davis will force a by-election in his seat solely on the issue of what he calls the "slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms" in the war on terror. Money quote:
"It cannot go on, it must be stopped," he said. "I will resign from this house, and I intend to force a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden.
"I will fight it, I will argue in this by-election against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this Government.
"That may mean I have made my last speech to the House, and that would be a cause of great regret to me," he added.
"If they do send me back here, it will be with a single, simple message - that the monstrosity of the law we passed yesterday will not stand."
In America, the land of the free, this president threw an American citizen in jail with no charges for four years and tortured him for good measure. To give a flavor of the British debate, here's a chat between Boris Johnson, a Brown flunky and Dr Who, aka David Tennant. The Dalek is a bonus:
Researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts, are testing a plan to train fish to catch themselves by using a sound broadcast to attract them into a net. If it works, the system could eventually allow black sea bass to be released into the open ocean, where they would grow to market size, then swim into an underwater cage to be harvested when they hear the signal.
“It sounds crazy, but it’s real,” said Simon Miner, a research assistant at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Wood’s Hole, which received a $270,000 grant for the project from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Well, not yet. You can buy "TheSockObama" here; and read commentary about it here and here. Money quote:
He proudly stands 16" tall and displays his run for Presidential
Candidate on his lapel. TheSockObama™ is made with high quality knit materials to capture the
nostalgic look of the Sock Monkey that we all know and love. Staying
true to his root, he is hand stuffed with just enough filling to give
him a firm, but huggable feel. The removable suit jacket offers two looks for this future President - All Business or Hands On.
Both candidates have deficit-increasing proposals that will likely
reduce economic growth. But McCain's take a bigger hole out of the
budget and the benefits are much more concentrated among the wealthiest
Americans.
Some early reaction to today's Supreme Court ruling. Lyle Denniston at SCOTUS blog:
In a stunning blow to the Bush Administration in its war-on-terrorism policies, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign nationals held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to pursue habeas challenges to their detention. The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights. If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so only as the Constitution allows — when the country faces rebellion or invasion.
The Court stressed that it was not ruling that the detainees are entitled to be released — that is, entitled to have writs issued to end their confinement. That issue, it said, is left to the District Court judges who will be hearing the challenges. The Court also said that “we do not address whether the President has authority to detain” individuals during the war on terrorism, and hold them at the U.S. Naval base in Cuba; that, too, it said, is to be considered first by the District judges.
"Petitioners have met their burden of
establishing that the DTA review process
is, on its face, an inadequate substitute for habeas."
And this very wide-ranging ruling:
"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."
And this defense of Constitutional government:
"To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on and off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say "what the law is...
Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom's first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adherence to the separation of powers ... Within the Constitution's separation-of-powers structure, few exercises of judicial power are as legitimate or as necessary as the responsibility to hear challenges to the authority of the Executive to imprison a person."
The Bush-Cheney attempt at dictatorial power for the presidency in the war on terror has not held. The system finally worked.
It's one thing for a journalist to give speeches to college audiences. It's another to be paid by big corporate interests. And it's another thing entirely to bask in corporate speech-making while condemning it in your columns.
Oh Andrew, come on. Can we have a reasoned debate about the long-term military presence in Iraq without having to wade into Chomsky-level rhetoric about the "expansion of American empire." The U.S. is a democracy negotiating with the elected leaders of a country over a military alliance between two nations. This is not the British in Malaysia. And we have already ceded to Iraqi demands regarding immunity for private contractors, authorization by Iraqi leaders in regards to military operations, and not using Iraq as a base of operations against other countries.
McCain's point is correct. Americans, by and large, do not care about U.S. service members being stationed overseas.
Your primary objection to a U.S. military presence in Iraq, as far as I can tell, is so called blowback--the idea that a U.S. presence in Iraq will incite Islamic extremist to terrorist activity. The debate, therefore, is whether or not the strategic benefits to a military presence outweigh the costs of inciting Islamic extremists. If, however, that is the primary calculus, then certainly the question over our strategic alliance with Israel would be as important a question as our presence in Iraq. But as far as I can tell, the difference on that question between the two candidates is practically nil. Oddly enough, the American public does not seem too vexed about the "expansion of American empire" into Afghanistan.
I'm struggling with this word "empire", because it is indeed excessive in the respects my reader points out and yet all the euphemisms seem to miss the point as well. Here's why: the US, without a second UN resolution, invaded a country, destroyed its regime, enabled chaos and near civil-war, and then helped establish a divided, but elected, government and wants to retain 50 bases in defense of that government. 50 bases. And yet the government itself seems deeply ambivalent and divided about this, the opposition strongly opposed, and Iraqis leery. Muslims everywhere would regard such a large US presence as an affront. The issue could even prompt serious weakening of a newly confident Maliki government. Yet we keep pressing for such a presence and the Republican nominee seems not to bat an eyelid at the decades of troop presence this could entail.
What do we call this? It's a good question. The troops in Germany, Japan and South Korea were established there to contain and deter the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union has passed away and yet still the troops remain. The troops were sent to Iraq to remove what we were told was a serious threat to the security of the US in Saddam's regime. Saddam's regime has passed away, the WMDs have been revealed as paper tigers, and yet still the troops remain. We were told this was to avoid chaos; but now we are told that even if chaos is averted and some stability restored, the troops must stay. The stated reason? Anti-terrorism. And what if the Iraqi government says it can control internal terrorism? Why would we need 50 bases then?
What I'm getting at is the constant drift in which what was unimaginable yesterday is now the baseline for today. Can we at least take a step back and think through what this means for the long term?
You may not realize that what Jindal did is strictly forbidden to Catholic laity.
The Catholic Church takes the possibility of demonic possession very seriously, albeit very rare, and because of centuries-long experience that dabbling by the inexperienced (whoever well intentioned they may be) in this area is rather disastrous, decrees the following in Canon 1172 of the Code of Canon Law (1983):
Can. 1172:
§1 No one may lawfully exorcise the possessed without the special and express permission of the local Ordinary.
§2 This permission is to be granted by the local Ordinary only to a priest who is endowed with piety, knowledge, prudence and integrity of life.
One wonders if any of the ultramontane crowd at The New Oxford Review bothered to ask Jindal if he had such permission or criticized him severely if it did not.
I love Dish readers. They seem to know everything.
Stephen Dubner makes some ice cream and some points about locavores. More often than not, locally eaten and prepared food is less efficient, less green, and, in my case, much less tasty.
I loved this: it's a series of YouTube movie reviews with two old codgers - "ReelGeezers" - ranting on intelligently about "Superbad." They also review "Sex And The City."
Long, long ago, I tried to persuade Barry Diller of all people to put on a political talk show including only those over 70 years old. Call it: The Old Timers. The great thing about the old is that they don't give a shit any more, and tend to say what they think. Imagine Mike Gravel debating Bob Dole with Frank Mankiewcz and Helen Thomas. Maybe not. But you get the point. And YouTubes are once again leading the way.
I've been feeling adrift myself these past few days. Drained, flat, a little cranky. A reader writes:
After some informal polling, my friends and I (Democratic, Republican and Independent) are taking a political time out now that the Democratic primary is over. We were absolutely obsessed with the primary, and we desperately need a break. The daily (hourly?) back and forths between McCain and Obama are of no interest to us right now (and also are very silly).
We will check in periodically, but until August (or the vps are selected), we’re all getting back to our normal lives, such as they are. It's not personal. We just need a little space for ourselves.
So Andrew, Josh, Arianna, Keith, my friends at the New Republic and on the Trail, we’ll talk in two months.
I understand the feeling. In retrospect, this primary campaign became a total mini-series of adrenaline and drama rushes. We're in the depressive detox recovery stage now. And the Obama-McCain contest seems oddly dull and currently trivial - at least to me, it does. How does one get it up for the Jim Johnson story?
"The ex-president revealed to a crucial number of people something that many of us already knew: he is a raging psycho. It's very gratifying to see more people catching up to that now," - Christopher Hitchens, on Bill Clinton, yesterday.
Encouraging news for the Democrat from the NBC poll:
By 62% to 28%, Hispanic voters support Sen. Obama. "That does not bode well for Republicans" in the Southwest, the Republican pollster added, in swing states such as Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, where Hispanic voters are numerous enough to tip the result. Sen. McCain, who comes from a state with a large Hispanic population and has favored liberalizing policies toward illegal immigrants, has hopes of matching Mr. Bush's record of winning more than 40% of Hispanic voters.
But this has got to worry Team O:
White suburban women, who make up 10% of the electorate, prefer a
Democrat to be president by 11 points, 47% to 36%, the poll shows. And
if Sen. Clinton were the nominee and the election were held now, she
would beat Sen. McCain among this group by 14 points, 51% to 37%. Yet
Sen. Obama loses to Sen. McCain by six points, 44% to 38%, among the
same group.
A PEW report on states getting rid of the electoral college:
Maryland last year became the first state to approve a "national popular vote" compact that would allocate all of its 10 electoral votes to the candidate who wins the most votes nationwide, rather than to the candidate who garners the most votes in the state, as is the case under the Electoral College.
New Jersey, Hawaii and Illinois have since followed suit and passed laws that would allot their collective 40 electoral votes the same way. Identical bills are moving in Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island, which have a total of 62 electoral votes.
These bills do nothing on their own and would take effect only when states that collectively have at least 270 electoral votes pass identical measures, since a candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.
A woman who has complained bitterly - and understandably - about racial stereotypes defends Fox News' use of the term "Baby-Mama" to describe Michelle Obama.
Some reaction from around the web on Jim Johnson, one of Obama's veep vetters, stepping down. Ambers:
If Obama's choice of Johnson was a mistake in the first place, then that's one thing. But if the campaign doesn't believe they made an error -- and they don't -- why give the Republicans a trophy head?
So what have we learned here? Once again, Obama continues to make unforced errors. The fact that tabbing Johnson as an eminence grise would trigger catcalls and raise eyebrows was far from unforeseeable. Indeed, it seems like everyone recognized the danger instantly except for Obama himself.
June 8, 2008 - June 14, 2008
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