A reboot report – from Marc Ambinder’s new politics blog, here at the Atlantic. I’m not sure how to introduce Marc to Dish readers. But Ross’s summary is pretty much on point:
"Last seen starring in The Note: First Blood, Part II, and The Hotline II: The Wrath of Chuck Todd."
Kind of your own private Politico.
The Atlantic redesigned the site a little, and the result is some disruption. The reason the site is looking weird for some of you is that your browser has not refreshed its cache and is overlaying the old design onto the new one. I’m told the way to resolve this is to hold down the shift button on your computer and click the re-load button on your browser. Of course, if you have this problem, you cannot read this post. But I figure I should post it anyway. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry for how often I have to say sorry.
Manchester, New Hampshire, 8.40 pm.
For an interactive gallery of Dish readers’ window views across the world, click here.
I went to the Democratic faith-off last night to see Edwards, Obama and Clinton expose their religious life to a religious-left audience. It felt to me like that scene in Coriolanus when the great leader is forced to go into the town square and let the hoi polloi examine, discuss and judge his war-scars. It was a spectacle at once spiritually crass, politicallly vulgar and democratically corrosive. It didn’t help that the theologically-challenged moderator, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, asked questions like: "What’s the biggest sin you’ve ever committed?" Just when you think cable news cannot get any dumber, someone like Ms O’Brien slinks onto a stage.
But the implications of the debate were more worrying. We have had terrible problems grappling with the religious right these past few years, but we may have just begun to adjust to the power and emergence of the religious left. The rhetoric would have done evangelical statist, Michael Gerson, proud. And when you see three leading Democratic candidates fall over each other to endorse faith-based initiatives, and insist, in Clinton’s words, on "injecting faith into policy," or, in Obama’s words, basing politics on a "Biblical injunction," you realize that George W. Bush really has had a legacy. He has decisively increased the religiosity of public debate – as well, of course, as its fatuousness. How can we "end poverty" in the next ten years, asked Jim Wallis? Umm: didn’t LBJ already try that? And, given the certainty and self-righteousness all around me, why not just end poverty, illness, and illegitimacy in the next ten months? Why not end tyranny as well, while we’re at it? (Oops: we just tried that. Never mind.) Jeez. Some people just keep putting boundaries on the power of God. When merged with government, what social ill can it not solve?
Both the religious right and the religious left make me feel more profoundly conservative. And between them, they have helped throttle the principle of limited government until the body politic is turning blue.
"Rudy’s preposterous position is compounded by the fact that he professes to be a Catholic. As Catholics, we are called, indeed required to be pro-life, to cherish and protect human life as a precious gift of God from the moment of conception until the time of natural death. As a leader, as a public official, Rudy Giuliani has a special obligation in that regard … I can just hear Pilate saying, ‘You know, I’m personally opposed to crucifixion but I don’t want to impose my belief on others,’" – Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Rhode Island.
With each election cycle, the conflation of religion and politics intensifies.
Finally!
Try not to flinch.
It’s obviously an aberration as a primary indicator. But surely a lot of its aberration has to do with the following fact:
The survey of 310 Democrats and 160 independents who "lean" Democratic, taken Friday through Sunday, has a margin of error of +/-5 percentage points… Among Democrats alone, Clinton leads Obama by 5 points, 34%-29%. That’s a significant narrowing from the USA TODAY Poll taken in mid-May, when she led by 17 points. Among independents, Obama leads by 9 points, 31%-22%.
Clinton has the base support that her name, her husband and her long record among the Democrats have earned her. But as a general election candidate, as someone who can appeal to independents and Republicans, as someone who can actually enlarge the Democrats – Obama is quite obviously the superior candidate. Do the Dems want to go forward and outward? Or backward and inward? That’s the choice they face between the Senator from Illinois and the Senator from New York.
He’s no longer charged with planting or even thinking about planting a dirty bomb. The charges he finally faces – after years of solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, vershaerfte Vernehmung – are based in large part on wiretapped phone conversations whose meanings seem ambiguous. Recall this:
Mr. Padilla, an American convert to Islam who was named an enemy combatant after his arrest in 2002, has the highest profile of the three but has not figured prominently in arguments over the calls.
That is because his voice is heard on only seven of the 300,000 or so calls that the F.B.I. recorded from 1994 to 2001. The government added his case to those of Mr. Hassoun and Mr. Jayyousi only after transferring him to civilian custody last year, as the Supreme Court considered taking up the legality of his military detention.
I can only hope that, finally, he is getting a fair trial. I’m not there, but testimony such as this does not exactly reflect well on the government:
Earlier Monday, the jury heard from Herbert Atwell, a former convict who said he attended a mosque in Broward County with Mr. Hassoun and Mr. Padilla in the 1990s. He said Mr. Padilla had been very quiet and carried a Spanish-language Koran, while Mr. Hassoun gave fiery speeches about the importance of "raising money for mujahedeen fighters all over the world."
But, in testimony that could paradoxically help the defense, Mr. Atwell said he had never perceived Mr. Hassoun to support terrorism or "mujahedeen fighters" to be terrorists. He said he believed they were "defending Muslims under attack."
The Dish 