Month: February 2010

Bernstein gives a lesson on the subject.

Johann Hari thinks that Cameron will be held captive by the more extreme elements in his party:

Cameron can tuck away the Tory Party on a poster, but he can’t tuck them away in parliament: they will be the source of his power. A leader can’t defy this Party’s core instincts for long, especially when he has (at best) a small majority. Every barking-right backbencher will have to be wooed and soothed and fed red meat to get legislation through. Cameron will be accountable to deeply retrograde forces – and they will demand policies that worsen poverty or global warming or prejudice.

"It wasn't enough to threaten our relations with the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Austria and the whole of the European Union, as well as the emirates and other moderate Muslim states, by apparently violating the basic conventions of all civilized states in the Dubai murder.

It was necessary to stage a quick follow-up, for the sake of balance, perhaps, in going after our relations with Israel's indispensable ally. In a gratuitous move breathtaking in its haughtiness, its ignorance of and disrespect for the United States and the American Jewish community, the Foreign Ministry – spearhead of Israel's campaign against boycotts abroad – elected this week to boycott a meeting with five U.S. Congressmen visiting Israel.

Why? The representatives were visiting under the auspices of J Street. J Street, in the ministry's eyes, is guilty of the crime of explicitly calling itself pro-Israel, while not agreeing wholeheartedly with everything the government of Israel says and does," – Bradley Burston, Haaretz.

Everything in this piece reflects what I've been trying to express this past year about the suicidal and ugly nature of Israel's current government, its contempt for Obama and the US, its utter tin ear with respect to global opinion, and the far more terrifying fact that this attitude now seems to enjoy vast support among Israelis themselves. Washington needs to wake up and face down the bullies and thugs of the pro-Israel Beltway. This is not the Israel we knew.

A reader writes:

I am an employee of Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Washington, and I am glad you have picked up on this story once again. I can say that nearly everyone I know below the Executive level is absolutely astonished, disgusted, and anxious at the Executive team’s utter obtuseness about their intentions moving forward, not to mention Catholic Charities’ continued betrayal of our mission to serve the poor, on behalf of a political fight.

Without DC government contracts, most CC programs in the District are doomed to the same fate as the foster care program, yet the Archdiocese (who calls all the shots – our Board of Directors is totally powerless, and worthless) still won’t tip their hand about whether or not we are actually going to continue to provide services, let alone reassure employees that the Archdiocese is concerned about us keeping our jobs.

Unofficially, I hear the Archdiocese will play ball with the District, and follow the lead of Georgetown University by providing benefits to “legally domiciled adults,” or some other generic construction, who co-habitate with CC employees, thereby including same-sex spouses without recognizing the marriages – but there has been no official word.

Every day that this process is dragged on, and reported on in the press, further sullies the reputation of the largest social services agency in the city, and worsens our chances of renewing funding with government and private foundations, whether or not CC ends up complying with the law and providing benefits to same-sex spouses.

No one is asking the Church to perform same-sex marriages or bless same-sex couples, but only to afford these couples the same civil rights they are guaranteed by law, and the human dignity the Church so staunchly defends for everyone else. A more forward-thinking, less reactionary, organization would have had a strategic plan in place for this the moment Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage years ago, and would be ready to make the necessary compromises to ensure that we continue to stay in business, and fulfill our mission, without drawing undue attention by showing contempt for the localities we serve.

But the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has zero desire to read the prevailing cultural winds, let alone adjust to them. It disgusts and saddens me that our leadership is so callow as to put culture wars above the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, and others whom the Catholic Church is dedicated to serve.

Several people I know, both gay and straight, have recently left Catholic Charities for other agencies, and with any luck I won’t be too far behind. Thank you for your continued attention to the Church’s failures to prioritize between it’s core values, and those on the periphery.

Something is rotten in the heart of the Catholic hierarchy. It is time real Catholics started standing up against it.

Stephanie Mencimer reports on GOProud's presence at CPAC. Their inclusion caused various social conservative groups to threaten a boycott:

Jimmy LaSalvia, GOProud's Hollywood-tanned executive director, was running his own booth with a few fellow conservatives sporting "Draft Cheney 2012" stickers on their dark suits. He seemed amused by the whole kerfuffle…LaSalvia said that the early controversy had only attracted more supporters to GOProud, which started about nine months ago as a more conservative alternative to the older Log Cabin Republicans.

Greenwald observes that the talking heads resisted calling yesterday's plane crash an act of terrorism:

All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon.  The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity.

It has really come to mean:  "a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies."  That's why all of this confusion and doubt arose yesterday over whether a person who perpetrated a classic act of Terrorism should, in fact, be called a Terrorist:  he's not a Muslim and isn't acting on behalf of standard Muslim grievances against the U.S. or Israel, and thus does not fit the "definition."  One might concede that perhaps there's some technical sense in which term might apply to Stack, but as Fox News emphasized:  it's not "terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to . . . terrorism in that capital T way."  We all know who commits terrorism in "that capital T way," and it's not people named Joseph Stack.

Amy Davidson makes related points. I'm still thinking this through. I have no doubt this act was meant to terrorize and when someone uses an airplane to crash into a federal building and kills people is is obviously terrorism. If he had yelled "Allah o Akbar!" instead of "Fuck the IRS!" would anyone be discussing this?

The taboo on the word has been broken and a writer, Mike Potemra, has written an anguished and genuinely Christian reflection upon it. Almost a decade after torture was implemented as American policy, the reality of what occurred has finally reached a conservative, Republican magazine. Read it. He responds to readers who say that waterboarding – one of the least grotesque torture techniques of the Cheney era – is not torture. There is, of course, no legitimate debate about this and never has been. But Potemra's response is very effective:

Instead of trying to find a definition, and to get everyone to agree to it, I ask myself the following, about any given interrogation practice: “If agents of Fidel Castro’s regime, or of China’s laogai, engaged in this activity, would I condemn it as torture?” That, I think, is the wisest course, because asking this question prevents me from endorsing acts that might be evil simply because it may be in my own self-protective interest (as an American who doesn’t want to be injured or killed in a terrorist attack) to do so.

And the question answers itself.

If an American merely suspected of being a spy were captured in Iran, if he were then shackled in a stress position for hours on end, if he were tied to a post in a yard in freezing conditions and regularly doused with cold water and beaten (as happened under Stanley McChrystal's Camp Nama in Iraq), if he were slammed against a ply-wood wall repeatedly by a collar around his neck, if he were strapped to a waterboard and nearly drowned 183 times, and then confessed that he was indeed a spy, and was planning to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, would the New York Times say he was subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques" and that his confession proved that those techniques worked? Would National Review? Would Dick Cheney?

Apparently, Ramesh Ponnuru – a Catholic – would. So far as I can tell, neither Thiessen nor Arroyo have responded to the mounting outcry. What I would recommend is emailing Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post and asking why he decided to appoint a man implicated in and defending war crimes, as defined by the Washington Post's editorial board itself, to be a weekly columnist at that paper. This is not a matter of free speech. Fred Hiatt can and should hire and fire whom he wants. And Charles Krauthammer the chief intellectual architect of the torture program, has long written an excellent op-ed column. But Krauthammer was not in the administration and close to the vice-president who authorized war crimes. Thiessen was.

Hiatt's email is here.

Molotov Mitchell defends Uganda’s kill the gays bill:

Alvin McEwen is repulsed:

[T]he most offensive item from this video comes at 3:00 when Mitchell actually evokes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to justify not only this bill but his labored defense of it: “Like the great Dr. King told us, ‘the moral arm of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.’ Ugandans, stay on the right side of history.”

Mitchell’s diatribe is probably the most disgusting thing I have ever seen and the fact that he actually evokes the words of Dr. King, a man who died for the causes of justice and nonviolence, to support a bill which would create genocide is beyond foul.

It is the same as Marc Thiessen’s Catholic defense of torture. It is so foul, so wrong, so appalling it should end that person’s credibility on any moral or political question. Instead, in today’s Washington, of course, it guarantees being given a column on the op-ed page of the Washington Post.

Congrats, Fred Hiatt. How long before John Yoo is given a recurring platform on your page?

Readers have asked why I haven't commented. To be honest, I spent much of yesterday afternoon at Princeton, where I gave a speech last night – to be broadcast on CSPAN at some point. I had to write my column after it and was working till 4 am. Today I focused on those posts I didn't need to amass a whole amount of new information on. Tonight I'm hosting a fundraiser at my house for the Trevor Project, an organization that helps gay teens contemplating suicide.

These past two weeks I've written several posts that are the length of essays and Chris and Patrick's invaluable help in finding and aggregating the blogosphere does not extend to the Dish's editorial opinion on such an event, its meaning, its implications. I hope to grapple with it over the weekend when I have had time to absorb the manifesto and the facts.

We work so hard here that it sometimes seems as if the Dish is now a well-staffed news organization. It isn't. There are three of us. I don't even have a personal assistant. We have only just been allowed two interns to help us exclusively. Give us a break sometimes, will you? We're only human.