Ryan Lizza casts a brutal light on Bill Richardson’s Iraq war flim-flam:
Note to the Richardson campaign: if you are going to change your position on Iraq and then rid your Web site of all evidence that you ever held that position, you’ll want to take down every incriminating example. You missed this one.
Longtime readers will know that I have long opposed the genital mutilation, aka circumcision, of male infants. New studies showing that it can be very effective against the transmission of HIV may well tip the balance of the argument. Nonetheless, it behooves us to be honest about what is being done and has been done to millions of men without their consent. They are having their capacity for sexual pleasure drastically reduced. A new study shows exactly how serious the mutilation can get:
Morris Sorrells of National Organization of Circumcision Information Resources Center and colleagues created a "penile sensitivity map" by measuring the sensitivity of 19 locations on the penises of 159 male volunteers. Of the participants, 91 were circumcised as infants and none had histories of penile or sexual dysfunction.
For circumcised penises, the most sensitive region was the circumcision scar on the underside of the penis, the researchers found. For uncircumcised penises, the areas most receptive to pressure were five regions normally removed during circumcision — all of which were more sensitive than the most sensitive part of the circumcised penis.
When your most intense sexual pleasure comes from scar tissue, something has gone wrong. My own view is that forcing boys to have most of their sexual pleasure zones destroyed without their express permission is a form of child abuse. If men want to have mutilated penises, that is their choice as adults. It shouldn’t be their parents’. And mercifully, many more parents seem to be agreeing.
You can detect a whiff of panic in David Frum’s latest column:
Ross Perot had an issue, the deficit. John Anderson had a constituency, the traditional liberals abandoned by Jimmy Carter in 1979-80. Bloomberg will have neither.
Yeah, there’s no parallel here at all is there? There’s no fiscal problem in Washington unaddressed by both parties, is there? Traditional conservatives have not deserted Bush, have they? He’s not regarded as Carter was, is he (his ratings are, in fact, lower)? And when a sane, secular candidate promises to tackle entitlement spending and climate change, no fiscal conservatives will warm to him, will they? Naah. Marc Ambinder thinks out loud about the potential impact of Bloomberg on both parties here.
Matt Yglesias tries to figure out when credible arms-backed diplomacy becomes unreasonable and counter-productive war-mongering. The devil is indeed in the details.
Andy Bacevich’s prescription for Iraq is worth mulling over. The question not fully answered by the column is: how do we actually quarantine a brand of Islam that wants to destroy the rest of Islam and the West as well? You can’t quarantine what you can’t even see. The answer, surely, is that, sure, we cannot quarantine it entirely. Such a religious ideology will always appeal to losers and fanatics; it will always seep out; and the laws of asymmetrical warfare mean that it will be successful at some point. All we can do is minimize the amount we do to needlessly foment more of it (like ineptly occupying Muslim countries, thus giving Islamism both oxygen and a rationale); do what we can to encourage democratic and secular movements among Muslim Arabs and Persians; strike selectively against al Qaeda-style terrorists, and then … we have to be honest, I think. The odds of avoiding more terror attacks are low. A policy of quarantining Islamism will have to live alongside it by definition. And that means enduring some terror in order to prevent more of it down the line. The alternative – trying to extirpate it by force of America arms – is not going to work. We surely know that by now.
A reader writes:
What I’ve never been able to understand about the torture debate is why people think that the highly specific ‘ticking time bomb’ exception somehow invalidates the drafting of a law prohibiting torture.
Imagine, in a Rawls kind of way, that you were writing the laws of our society from scratch. When you were devising speed limits, imagine if someone said, "Wait! Someone, under certain specific circumstances, might need to speed home to help their wife in labor, or put out a fire. We’d better not prohibit speeding."
Though I can’t think of any situation that has ever actually happened where torture would be permissible, I can accept the possibility that it could come up. But whoever, in that exceptional situation, makes the decision to torture, needs to stand in front of a judge and explain exactly why and how they did it. Just like I would if I was busted for speeding, or murdered someone out of self-defense, or stole food to feed my family. That’s how the law works. Specific, situational exceptions do not invalidate general principles.
This is obviously true unless you have already decided to make the exception the rule, and then need to find legal justification for lawlessness. Once you accept that scenario, much of what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld did makes sense. The point of torture is always torture. In my view, Cheney clearly believes in the rationale of pure violence. It’s all about the imposition of naked will by brute force on another entity. A waterboard helps.
Megan McArdle is befuddled by the illegal immigration debate:
There are a shocking number of purportedly educated people who think that Mexican immigration is a new, more dangerous phase of American history because, well, there are so many of them! And they don’t speak English! You can travel for an hour through their neighbourhoods without hearing anything but Spanish! …
I can only think of one group that has managed to ruthlessly prevent assimilation, passing their strange religious customs, their language, and their clothes on generation after generation . . . a group that refuses to serve in the military, barely pays taxes, and frequently pulls its children out of school after eighth grade to keep them from getting Americanised. Not only that, but they have dominated their local area with their funny customs for years, pushing their unAmerican agenda on their neighbours.
That group is, of course, the Amish, and many of the same people complaining that Mexicans won’t assimilate flock to Lancaster to take pictures of women in funny hats vending sticky-sweet food and overpriced handwork. Can someone explain this in terms that don’t devolve into "But the Mexicans are brown"?
Can someone explain this in terms that don’t devolve into "But the Mexicans are brown"?
Ask Patrick Buchanan. Dare you.
Spiked looks at the meaning of the current wave of celebrity concern about Africa:
Bono’s rise shows the role that Africa plays for many people today. For politicians and celebrities alike, Africa has become a stage for moralistic posturing. Campaigning on African poverty is something that ‘gives me a sense of purpose, something to work for’, as a contributor to Bono’s Vanity Fair puts it. Or as Paul Theroux bitingly argues: "Because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth."
More curled lip here.
For those who miss the Osmonds, the five Romney brothers now have a blog about their super and amazing dad and his fabulous campaign. You can read emails from Dad on Father’s Day and plenty of reports from Tagg!! about combining his love of that super game, baseball, with his dad’s fantastic 
presidential campaign. Those Romneys sure do love razzing each other:
One of my favorite things about this blog is the fun we get to make of each other publicly. A friend sent me the link to a blogger who apparently had a crush on Josh during college. Thought you’d enjoy reading it, even if she is a Democrat!
But a Democrat with fantastic taste in Romneys. Of course, I have a crush on Ben. It’s the beard. Who’s your favorite? A recent classic Tagg!! post:
The column claims we are more Brady Bunch than Simpsons, obviously oblivious to the fact that I get most of my expressions from Ned Flanders, that Ben named his high school band (he was a drummer) after Milhouse (who in turn was named after Richard Milhouse Nixon, in whose cabinet my grandfather served as Secretary of HUD), that my son Thomas is as mischevious as Bart and my daughter Allie as smart as Lisa, or that my son Joe has an appetite for jelly doughnuts …
Indeedly-doodly!
"In a way, the day is darker than the night. There is no feeling of safety," – a Gazan woman living in the wake of civil war and incipient Islamist rule.
The Dish 