Month: June 2007

Some home news. I’ve added a blogroll – after seven years of negligence, and called it "Blog Love". And I have a designated assistant, Jessie Roberts – after seven years of solo-flying. It’s a new world.

When I started the Dish during the Clinton presidency (it seems like another universe now, doesn’t it?), there were only a handful of blogs covering the stuff I was interested in. Now there are hundreds and hundreds of good ones, and it’s humanly impossible for one person to keep track of them all. Mercifully, the Atlantic (cue suck-up sound) allowed me to bring interns into the mix, just one example of MSM-bloggy synergy. Jessie is my first alumna of the first batch, and she’s staying to help me stay on top of things. If you’ve noticed an uptick in both the volume and diversity of my links, she and her erstwhile colleagues are responsible for tipping me off. The Dish now routinely looks at science blogs, literary blogs, culture blogs, religion blogs, art-blogs, and any new blogs that spring up and could do with wider exposure. I still browse everywhere and rely also on your tips and links. But I now have a permanent research assistant for back-up. A shout-out to Jessie, and my first team of Dish-preppers, Whitney, Eric, Zoe, and Brooke, who just left for the wider world. A new group began this week. And check out all the blogs in the "Blog Love" list. We worked hard and long on filtering out the blogosphere to highlight our favorite sites. If you’re new to blogging, and want to learn more about what’s out there, it’s a great place to start.

A reader writes:

I just finished "Imperial San Francisco", and the chapters on the Spanish American War, and the continuing war in the Philippines which followed all sound eerily familiar, especially in terms of the rhetoric surrounding both wars and the war in Iraq.

The war in the Philippines included torture, concentration camps, and at least one general who ordered his troops to kill all women and children over the age of 10. This was in order to bring freedom and civilization to the Philippines. This war "officially" ended in 1902, but fighting went on until 1913- that’s 14 years of a very nasty and brutal war.

From Wikipedia:

The shift to guerrilla warfare, however, only angered the Americans into acting more ruthlessly than before. They began taking no prisoners, burning whole villages, and routinely shooting surrendering Filipino soldiers. Much worse were the concentration camps that civilians were forced into, after being suspected of being guerrilla sympathizers. Thousands of civilians died in these camps. In nearly all cases, the civilians suffered much more than the guerrillas.

What we are seeing with the Bush Administration is a reversion to late 19th century American foreign policy- that is, imperialism (annexation of territory to acquire resources – "our resources") disguised as bringing freedom and democracy to the natives.

Just don’t tell Bob Kagan. He’ll get too excited.

(Photo: Filipino casualties on the first day of the war.)

If FaceBook is any indicator, it’s an interesting generation:

Peter Berkowitz pays tribute. No one has ever captured the intractability of the theologico-political problem like Spinoza. Money quote:

Rebecca Goldstein believes that Spinoza’s thinking is highly relevant today. Its relentless naturalism provides philosophical depth to the demand that human conduct be understood without recourse to mysterious and unobservable causes. Its attention to fundamental desires as well as the avenues to their satisfaction and the causes of their frustration advances a psychologically rich theory of the emotions. And, as I’ve mentioned, its reflections on the true requirements of piety furnish powerful arguments in support of the separation of church and state (before he wrote the Letter Concerning Toleration, Goldstein notes, John Locke spent several years in Amsterdam after Spinoza’s death in the company of those who had been influenced by his thought).

On immigration, he stood his ground. On the war, he’s sadly wrong, I think. But I don’t doubt his good will and conviction. He’s not a saint and he’s made compromises (I can’t forgive him for giving Bush the power to torture). But in the interaction above, he directly confronted and addressed the pain and tragedy of this bungled war in a way the president has not and cannot. And McCain’s view that withdrawal will be extremely dangerous must absolutely be put on the table. The question of whether we withdraw from the Jihadist trap will soon become a question of how we do it. I don’t see how Darfur liberals can be so blithely indifferent to a looming genocide in Iraq that we have precipitated, while urging intervening to mitigate one elsewhere. McCain’s conviction will rightly put that debate front and center. Giuliani earned some integrity points for sticking up for cultural pluralism and against the impulse to bring the healthcare industry under more government control. But his crudeness in foreign policy is too hotheaded, in my judgment, for these perilous times. So: McCain’s night from my perspective, even though he may be losing the base. Best to go down fighting, Senator.

The line of the night from McCain to Romney:

Governor, muchas gracias.

It’s rare to see a fraud exposed quite as clearly in real time as the Republichameleon. So he’s for making English the national language, but runs campaign ads in Spanish: an almost perfect representation of the plastic one’s bullshit. And I have to say that McCain’s defense of Native-Americans and Latino-Americans has been one of his finest moments. He didn’t have to go there. But he did anyway. He reminded me why, despite many disagreements, I still believe he’s as classy a leader as the GOP has got.

He both declared that the principle of life was non-negotiable; then he said he would support a pro-choice nominee, if it came to that. That principle lasted about 35 seconds, didn’t it? Can these people hear themselves?

It’s fascinating to watch the GOP candidates try and walk back from Christanism. But they’re in too deep. Since the Rove strategy, the GOP has appealed on explicitly religious grounds to Biblical literalists. In fact, they sometimes defend public policy – like opposition to civil marriage for gay couples – on Biblical grounds. If they have cited Genesis, it’s fair to ask if they literally believe in it. They all dodged it. That branch they’re sitting on the end of. It’s getting wobbly, isn’t it? Now ask them about the Rapture.

An interesting nuance, if I read it right. Giuliani opposes Iran’s possession of even civilian nuclear power, not just nuclear weapons. I can see the logic behind such a position, but it would fatally undermine the sanctions regime. Someone needs to ask Rudy if that is indeed his position. It’s a ratcheting up of the stakes, if it is.

All I can say is: what a disgrace. Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee don’t even seem to know what the current policy is. It is currently based not on regulating behavior or misbehavior but on orientation and the disclosure of that orientation. How can candidates be so ignorant about such a well-trafficked issue? Huckabee even called being gay an "attitude." Jeez. What planet do these guys live on? Then there’s Romney, who once again has flip-flopped. His defense of the Clinton policy which he once opposed is that "it’s working." I know of no one who once opposed the policy who now supports it, because "it’s working". And I simply don’t believe Romney means what he says. He’s an opportunist and a liar. And, of course, as the question showed, the policy is throwing out critical servicembers in a time of war. McCain and Giuliani: they know better. The lack of any real argument in defense of the Republican candidates’ position combined with the blanket refusal to revisit it is a sign of only one thing: contempt for the many servicemembers who are gay. The truth is: Giuliani and McCain do not support the troops. They want to persecute and stigmatize a minority of them. These old men are out of date and out of touch. Like the party they represent.