Month: June 2007

Misty Irons explains:

It is rare to find an author who is willing to be so plainly truthful about the danger of hope. That once you begin to believe in your own dignity and worth, that you deserve to be loved and valued and cared for like anyone else, this ratchets up the stakes to the point where you can no longer accept anything less, and there is no turning back. Maybe that’s why people are inclined to take the easier, safer route of learning contentment in a kind of moderate degradation, where the risks are fewer and the disappointments less devastating.

What some people call "the homosexual agenda" I see as a daring movement to ratchet up the stakes to where there is no turning back. And the gay marriage movement is about as high as you can take it.

A major witness to this White House’s direct link to Abu Ghraib and the torture regime has come forward. And he couldn’t have better credentials: General Antonio Taguba. More on this tomorrow, but for now: don’t miss the piece. Money quote:

During the next two years, Taguba assiduously avoided the press, telling his relatives not to talk about his work. Friends and family had been inundated with telephone calls and visitors, and, Taguba said, “I didn’t want them to be involved.” Taguba retired in January, 2007, after thirty-four years of active service, and finally agreed to talk to me about his investigation of Abu Ghraib and what he believed were the serious misrepresentations by officials that followed. “From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups,” Taguba told me. His orders were clear, however: he was to investigate only the military police at Abu Ghraib, and not those above them in the chain of command. “These M.P. troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”

Justice is coming.

(Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty.)

As long as a French president can get completely shit-faced at lunch with the Russian president, I feel relatively secure the world isn’t coming to an end:

So the media is under-covering Iraq, immigration and Paris Hilton. But not the election. I’m not sure what this says about Al Gore’s "Assault On Reason" thesis. Burt somehow I don’t think he believes the media is not covering the Hilton scandal enough.

Richard Hale of Port Angeles, Washington, joined about 30 people on the National Mall near the Washington Monument during an anti-illegal-immigrant rally sponsored by the Minuteman Project June 15, 2007 in Washington, DC. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

A good question, and Jonah has an excellent column on the subject. Steyn agrees. But is there a contradiction in Steyn’s argument? Brian Beutler:

Interestingly, in the middle of making the case against the whole public school system, he’s pointed out the fact that state-run schools can be run successfully. They’re run successfully in other countries, and, additionally, they’re run successfully in plenty of municipalities around this country. What that means is that there are plenty of templates–and no shortage of data–that the government can use if it wants to actually fix (as opposed to grenade) the problems. That would, of course, be both simpler than privatizing everything and would allow us to avoid all the problems that would no doubt arise if we instituted the sort of voucher/magnet system which – similar data shows – is riddled with problems of its own.

One of the recent lowpoints of an Obama speech was his invocation of "crumbling" schools in DC. If Obama thinks the problem with public education in DC is insufficient funding, he really should visit more often.

An insult comic dog and a bunch of mainly obscure actors? Sublime:

"Were our founding fathers here, they would surely look on Iraq with horror and judge that the nation they created had fundamentally lost its way. If the war in Iraq leads the United States to return to its traditional, restrained grand strategy, then perhaps the whole experience will not have been in vain. Either way, the Iraq syndrome is coming. We need to be prepared for the divisiveness, vitriol, self-doubt and recrimination that will be its symptoms. They will be the defining legacy of the Bush administration and neoconservatism’s parting gift to America," – Christopher J. Fettweis, an assistant professor of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. "Reader Brett Conner, who sent word of this, writes: ‘One of the reasons I left the military was being stabbed in the back by our fellow countrymen. It happened to my father in Vietnam, and I didn’t want to continue living through the same experience.’ I’m afraid a lot of people will view Harry Reid’s statement that way. Of course, some folks like the way the Vietnam War turned out," – Glenn Reynolds, dress-rehearsing the "stab-in-the-back" canard he will surely use to scapegoat, rather than understand, the total failure of the president he voted for twice.

The pro-war right is surely not going to take defeat in Iraq or at home gently. If we withdraw from Iraq in the next year, and a terror attack occurs in the U.S., regardless of its provenance, watch Giuliani blame the Democrats and try to win the election on a classic "we-were-stabbed-in-the-back-we need-a-strong-leader" message. The constitutional dangers of such a move are, of course, grave. I can indeed see a scenario in which a classic fascist-style appeal to wounded nationalism – combined with a call to suspend constitutional protections in favor of a presidential protectorate and a Weimar-style "stab-in-the-back" smear against the MSM – will become the  mantra of the Southern-dominated GOP in the next election. If you can’t see it coming, you don’t know who they are.

Qote

A reader writes:

Can’t we also apply the ticking bomb scenario to regular criminals?

Let’s say you have a father/son serial killer team.

You have the son in custody. The father is out there. He has kidnapped N children and is going to torture, rape and then kill them in a secret location. How big does N have to get before you start torturing the son to find out where he is? It works just fine for regular US citizens too, you see.

Now imagine the guy has TWO sons. One of them knows where Dad is, but the other doesn’t, and has nothing to do with the crime. Only you don’t know which is which. How big does N have to get before you torture them both?

Now imagine the innocent son is Mickey Kaus.

The point of torture is always torture.

Kaneohe, Hawaii, 1 pm.

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