Category: Old Dish

No, she doesn’t want her own blog. Why would she need one? (Hat tip: Mickey).

I know it sounds weird, but that’s cricket – a brutal fight over a pot of inert gray matter. All of England is now celebrating. Oxblog explains.

“Just last weekend, I was at my “Conservative Catholic” friends house.
The compassion that they have because of their religion is astounding. They are a family of four, living on one salary (a teacher’s salary at that) and are still able to support four children in other countries through a Compassion International-type program.
The compassion that they lack because of their political ideology is astounding. “Fuck them,” was basically their response to all that were left in New Orleans.
The disconnect between their political beliefs and their religious beliefs is just unfathomable to me … maybe I should ask them about torture.”

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “In what way is it Christian to refrain from doing everything possible to protect our wives and children from murderers and terrorists? These guys have made it their life goal to kill the weakest and most innocent among us for no reason at all and you and the “Christianity and Torture” emailer are trying to make it seem unreasonable to take extraordinary steps to protect us. We are dealing with people who are worse than rabid animals, they are remorseless and insane fanatics who would destroy all we hold dear.”

LBJ conservatism strikes again.

We’re FEMA.

CHRISTIANITY AND TORTURE: An emailer vents:

I read with interest your latest entry concerning Alberto Gonzalez’ shuffling reply to Jackson Diehl’s question on Bush’s policy on foreign prisoner treatment. As I read the question, the reply and your following brief commentary, I began to wonder – if Bush is the Christian he claims to be, if he has one small iota of compassion for others in him, how does that influence his condoning or allowing cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of foreign prisoners? Where is the compassion Christians are supposed to have for others? Where is there evidence of the Golden Rule here? Why have we not heard the Christian fundamental base rise up in loud, vocal anger over the poor and abusive treatment of these prisoners? Simply put, would Jesus treat the prisoners this way? Obviously not. Should a self-proclaimed follower of Jesus treat prisoners, or allow prisoners to be treated, this way? Definitely not.

To be fair, some evangelicals have indeed protested the shift in American policy toward allowing the abuse and cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment of detainees. But this president is an enthusiast for executing prisoners (I may be wrong, but has any living person in America signed as many death warrants as president Bush?) and has shown no qualms at all about using torture in the war on terror; and has promoted everyone involved in crafting the new abuse policy, including Gonzales. I don’t know how he squares this with Christianity. Maybe someone in the press could ask him.

Michael Brown resigns as head of FEMA. He wasn’t fired. And his reason for resigning was to take the media’s heat off the president. Not because he’d screwed up.

“I’ve got an idea for our Pentagon planners. The day I can land at the airport in Baghdad and ride in an unarmored car down the highway to the Green Zone is the day I’ll start considering withdrawal from Iraq.” – John McCain, telling it like it is. The one silver lining from Katrina – apart from the very heartening possibility that many fewer lives may have been lost than was feared – is that once we have seen incompetence exposed somewhere, we may be less intimidated from pointing it out elsewhere. I was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq and still am, but from the very beginning, I began to worry about how it was being conducted. I still am. When more conservatives and Republicans stop drinking the Rove Kool-Aid, or bravely looking the other way, maybe we’ll have a chance to get things moving in a better direction. The troops deserve a winning strategy. We don’t have one.

Why cannot the Bush administration answer a simple question with regard to its prisoner detention policies in the war on terror? Jackson Diehl tried to get an answer from Alberto Gonzales. He cannot get one. Money quote:

During a meeting at The Post late last month I asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a pretty simple question: Is it the policy of the Bush administration not to subject the foreign prisoners it is holding to “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment? The phrase I quoted refers to abuse falling just short of torture. It is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified a decade ago by the Senate.

Gonzales started to reply, then hesitated. Then he said he wasn’t sure, and would have to get back to me with an answer.

The answer, however, is obvious. This administration practices, condones and supports a policy that allows for “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of detainees in its custody. They just won’t admit it. Why? The answer to that question tells you a great deal about what this administration is fundamentally about.

A native New Orleanian’s take.

Not just the Bushies, of course.

“KIND OF FUN”: I got emails relaying this story before and I ignored them, thinking that it was just too crazy to be true. Apparently, it isn’t. Tom DeLay really is that big of an idiot.