Month: June 2005

Triumph interviews Michael Jackson supporters. (Mad props: Jonah.)

Some of you have emailed me to say that I’m misinterpreting Kos. Here’s the argument:

“The torture that was so bad under Saddam, is equally bad under U.S. command” does not mean “Saddam and the US torture the same amount” but rather “torture is just as wrong under US command as under Saddam’s command”.

The sentence, when re-read, is indeed unclear and could be read either way, I think. Well: Kos can clear it up. All he need say is that the torture that has occurred under the U.S., while nothing like as extreme or as widespread as under Saddam, is still reprehensible. I look forward to his clarification on these lines and will happily link to it if it appears and withdraw his award nomination.

“Your complaint about Rick Santorum should have been more nuanced. There has always been federal review of death sentences, on some level, through federal habeas corpus proceedings as a collateral attack on state-court judgments. And when Congress gave the federal courts jurisdiction to hear the Schiavo case, there was likewise federal review of that “death sentence” as well. I don’t know if Santorum’s a lawyer; if he is, he clearly skipped out on his first-year civil procedure class. Just because a federal court has jurisdiction to review a claim does not mean that that court will decide it differently than the state courts. (This is, after all, the big complaint about federal review of death penalty cases – that federal courts are overturning the presumptively correct decisions of state courts.) From a legal standpoint, the shocking and unprincipled argument Frist and Santorum and their ilk were making was that federal courts should step in and overturn state-court judgments in cases where it suits them (Schiavo, et al.) and refrain from doing so in cases where it doesn’t (death penalty). This isn’t principle, it’s politics, and most Americans saw right through it.”

“The torture that was so bad under Saddam, is equally bad under U.S. command.” – Markos Moulitsas, on DailyKos yesterday. Look, few have been as outraged as I have been by what this administration has perpetrated and permitted with regard to detainees in U.S. care. But this kind of morally cretinous hyperbole only discredits the serious case against the administration. You want to see Saddam’s torture? Look here.

“[We] have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. [We] have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows… Our unfortunate troops,… under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad.” – T.E. Lawrence, Sunday Times of London, August 22, 1920.

More evidence from the field that the fundamental problem in Iraq is now and has been from the beginning insufficient troop levels to do the job. Here’s a quote from the NYT today that’s worth pondering:

“We have a finite number of troops,” said Maj. Chris Kennedy, executive officer of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which arrived in Tal Afar several weeks ago. “But if you pull out of an area and don’t leave security forces in it, all you’re going to do is leave the door open for them to come back. This is what our lack of combat power has done to us throughout the country. In the past, the problem has been we haven’t been able to leave sufficient forces in towns where we’ve cleared the insurgents out.”… “Resources are everything in combat, and when you don’t have enough manpower to move around, you have to pick the places,” said Maj. John Wilwerding, executive officer of Sabre Squadron, a 1,000-strong unit that now oversees Tal Afar.

The troops we have may be doing their level best to gain the advantage and may even have a strategy to do so. But you cannot pacify a country of 24 million with 130,000 troops. And the failure to restore order has only helped the insurgents, undermine public support for the war and make failure possible. Do we have sufficient troops to rectify our error? Apparently not. So we are stuck in a failure zone to which the administration’s response is always: we have never had more success.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “If a state court decides to take the life of someone, there should be a federal review.” – senator Rick Santorum, on the Schiavo case. So the feds now have jurisdiction over all death penalty cases, all end-of-life decisions under state law, and on and on? When someone as fanatical as Santorum is so dominant in the Republican party, you know that conservatism as we have known it is essentially over.

HE’S BACK: GayPatriot ends his anonymity and gets back to blogging.

AND, UNFORTUNATELY, THIS: My third area of sad agreement with John Derbyshire was a bad link yesterday. Here’s the right one.

What’s really going on in Massachusetts with the anti-gay right dropping support for the 2006 vote on the anti-marriage equality constitutional amendment in favor of a new 2008 referendum? A reader offers an explanation:

The decision of anti-marriage equality forces in Massachusetts to forego a compromise constitutional amendment (that would create civil unions) set to be voted on in 2006 and instead work for another amendment to be voted on in 2008 that would ban same sex marriage (and not create civil unions) should be seen in the light of Governor Mitt Romney’s Presidential ambitions (and his likely decision, I think, not to run for re-election at home). To appeal to the out-of state Republican right, Romny has moved far to the right in the past several months in terms of abortion and stem cell research. He has visted red states projecting an anti-Massachusetts Liberal image for himself. He seems now more opposed to civil unions. Not surprisingly, his local poll numbers have accordingly dropped. The proposed amendment in 2006 would be a political nightmare for Romney. If the 2006 amendment were to pass, Massachusetts would constitutionally create civil unions on his watch. If the 2006 amendment were to fail, which looks increasingly likely, Massachusetts would have voted for gay marriage on his watch. Either way, it would be a hard sell to the right wing Republican base. He would look weak or too liberal. Romney is far better off to back a clear cut ban without civil unions that couldn’t be voted on until 2008. That way he doesn’t have to live with the consequences of 2006 and he can maintain he was always opposed to both gay marriage and civil unions.

It makes more sense now.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Recently I had lunch with someone who at some point during his seminary studies was in a chaplaincy-training program in the Navy. He has been out of the country for some time and was unaware of the scandal at the Air Force Academy. His response was that from his experience there is a similar problem in the Navy and his comments about some of the chaplains candidates were less than reassuring. What he did say is that it is his impression that some in the Naval chaplaincy are aware of the problem and would like to try and rectify the situation. His memory of the reaction of some of the candidates to the workshops on pluralism, etc. was far from positive. His feeling was that some of them “just didn’t get it”.
Thinking about his comments later I realized that the larger problem, one which is far more sensitive and problematic, is the nature of much of Evangelical Protestantism, at least here in the US. Many of them make no bones about their mission of aggressive evangelizing among Catholics, Jews, etc. Our conversation reminded me of the comments from another former chaplain-candidate, now a rabbi, who said that during his training (in the Air Force) one of the Protestant candidates said that he was upset that such a nice person would still be going to hell because he hasn’t accepted Jesus Christ as his savior (this is more or less what I remember him recalling). As if our Armed Forces don’t have their hands full with immediate issues of life and death.”

“I think conservatives need to discuss the rise of the Hannity right. I was drawn to the conservative side by Bill Buckley’s relentless and civilized dismantling of liberal orthodoxy and by Ronald Reagan’s sunny faith in individual effort, private enterprise and the goodness of America. I was cemented in the cause by the thought of lesser though still very bright lights such as Tom Sowell, Walter Williams, Charles Krauthammer, Newt Gingrich and just about the whole 1980s NR crowd.
Hannity is a significant departure from this serious tradition. Unlike Rush Limbaugh, whose genius is to approach familiar issues with unfamiliar arguments, Hannity approaches familiar issues with entirely familiar arguments. His points have been made a thousand times before, far more effectively and successfully. He is a bore, and a bully whose attempts to adopt a “nice guy” persona fall flat. Whereas I always sense Rush’s innate humility even when at his theatrically bombastic best, Hannity’s self regard is overwhelming even when assuring us that he owes all to his listeners. In fact, he owes all to his interesting line-up of guests, without whom his show would be entirely worthless.
His national tours, so far as I can tell from the radio, tend to attract the yobbo element — all shouting, cheering and hissing. Can you imagine such a thing from the audience at Firing Line? Was there even an audience?
Hannity is several steps backward for conservatives. We have been, are, and must remain, far better than this.”

John Derbyshire is, I think, right about this, and this, and, unfortunately, this.

The last major news organization, Reuters, has now departed Fleet Street in London. It was once the hub of an entire industry, a maze of pubs and offices where drunken hacks swapped stories, flattered sources and generally had a good time. I managed to see the very last gasp. I was an intern for two summers at the grand old Daily Telegraph building (Waugh’s “Scoop” features it prominently), and two decades ago, hammered out editorials on a manual type-writer, surrounded by a bevy of sloshed but brilliant mentors. I was ushered into the recesses of ancient pubs where columnists once gathered, and witnessed the delivery vans pouring out of the bowels of the old buildings at closing time. Now I blog at home – paper- and alcohol-free. Yes, those were the days …