Category: Old Dish

Hitch versus Galloway – live in Manhattan on September 14.

If it could work in Iraq, why not in education policy in America? That’s the question Eduwonk asks. It’s a good one. I feel the same way about equality in marriage. Let’s leave Massachusetts alone, let’s build the case for gay marriage by showing how it works in a handful of places and then work from there.

Bob Kagan senses that the administration doesn’t mean what it says about democracy in Mubarak’s satrapy.

“Because peace comes at a price, and no one knows that better than the leader of the modern peace movement himself, Deepak Chopra! Jeez! I hope he’ll talk more about good and evil, and how you can’t tell them apart! I love it when he makes peaceful sense of genocide – Like the way he wrote that the Holocaust happened not simply because Hitler was, like, evil – but because, like the present day, “all countries on both sides of the terror divide are enmeshed in the same conflicted mind set. The inability to accept and respect dissimilar views of the world is present. “
It’s true – we really do hate it when people get gassed. But whether you gas people, or stop people from being gassed – it’s all the same! We’re all just gases anyway. We really need to get out of the US vs Them mindset, people. Well, unless you’re the U.S. Then “the blame for whatever follows will fall on America’s head.”” – Greg Gutfeld on Deepak Chopra’s $1,095 per person course on bringing about world peace.

From Wonkette:

SHEPARD SMITH: You’re live on FOX News Channel, what are you doing?

MAN IN NEW ORLEANS: Walking my dogs.

SMITH: Why are you still here? I’m just curious.

MAN: None of your fucking business.

The voice of free country.

Hitch is still proud of deposing Saddam and trying to move Iraq toward a sane and democraric country. Me too. Despite all the errors.

The one David Brooks referred to.

Benedict XVI’s attempt to scapegoat faithful, celibate gay priests and religious for the child abuse protected by the Vatican appears to be gaining momentum.

A useful round-up of hysterical far left responses to any legitimate discussion of intelligence and group differences. Far left activist Atrios calls me “a bigot or a fool” in his post. No, Mr Black. Just interested in the truth. He also says that my claim to have published an extract from the Bell Curve before anyone else is untrue. He’s wrong. TNR ran the only advance piece by Murray on the subject. And the cover-date for TNR is always a couple of weeks ahead of the actual published date (it keeps its shelf-life on news-stands), which may account for Atrios’ error. The magazine was certainly not alone in covering the controversy. But we pioneered it. I have the scars to show for it.

MORE ON PENGUINS: An emailer with another tale of gay parenting:

A good friend of mine worked on “Rock Island” at the Baltimore Zoo for several years after college. Rock Island is the home of the zoo’s colony of African (Black-footed) penguins. If memory serves, African penguins mate for life rather than seasonally — which included the for-life pair of Bob and Dave. Apparently some of the (heterosexual) mating pairs weren’t terribly adept at caring for their eggs or young, so when these particular pairs would produce an egg the zoo staff would snatch if from their nest, replace it with a fake, and put the real egg in Bob and Dave’s nest because they were very good at caring for an egg. My friend used to say that when Bob and Dave would come back to their nest and find an egg there they’d look at each other in a puzzled way as if to say, “Hmmm… one of us must’ve had an egg.” Then they’d go about the normal business of caring for it as though it were theirs.

That, of course, is roughly what many gay couples now do in human societies, when children, abandoned or mistreated by their heterosexual parents, manage to find foster or adopted homes with gay families. And that care for children is precisely what some on the religious right want to prevent. I don’t get it.

Well, it doesn’t look to me like an impasse. It looks to me like an inevitable moment of truth in a democratic process. The one minority group that is bound to lose the most from a new, devolved constitution – the Sunni elite – is resisting the complete rearrangement of Iraq’s polity on democratic lines. Sure, it would have been much better if legit Sunni leaders had signed onto a solid deal. But they didn’t, and now their recalcitrance will be put to a vote. Yes: a vote. What we have here is a remarkable demonstration of a modern Arab and Muslim country working through its own political arrangements in a pre-ordained constitutional process. That itself is something of an achievement. It reveals that although the U.S. is obviously heavily present as a force for ultimate order, the Iraqis themselves are figuring out how to run their country again. This takes time, as president Bush is right to point out, and patience. And it is also a demonstration of the kind of transformation we are aiming for in the Middle East: where people take responsibility for their own polities in a democratic fashion. I don’t think the Bush team could have waved a magic wand and made all this difficult bargaining any easier or simpler, and from all that I can tell, they have been doing the best they can. It doesn’t seem that obvious to me either that the failure to get the Sunnis to sign off means a more intense insurgency. The violence is being propelled by forces who want no deal at all – and some kind of deal might have emboldened them still further. The job of the U.S. is to do a far better job of providing security. David Brooks’ suggestion seems like a no-brainer. John McCain’s support for more troops makes sense as well. No real progress will be made militarily without removing Rumsfeld, however. He remains the most intransigent defender of failed policies. He should go; the Iraq process should continue; the goal of reshaping the Muslim Middle East remains our best security aginst future terror. If you’re interested, I make a more detailed case for cautious optimism here.
UPDATE: Juan Cole counters my cautious optimism.

BIG GOVERNMENT CONSERVATISM: The Bush people spend like paleo-liberals; they borrow like paleo-liberals; and they regulate like paleo-liberals. The only thing they don’t do is tax like paleo-liberals. But that will come. This president has made the permanent increase of taxation in this country an inevitability.