Category: Old Dish

Afghanistan has been a success story in many ways so far. All the more reason to be concerned about the damage done because of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy of tolerating abuse. Money quote:

“Abu Ghraib ruined the reputation of the Americans in Iraq and to me this is even worse,” said Faiz Mohammed, a top cleric in northern Kunduz province. “This is against Islam. Afghans will be shocked by this news. It is so humiliating. There will be very, very dangerous consequences from this.” Anger also was evident in the streets. “If they continue to carry out such actions against us, our people will change their policy and react with the same policy against them,” said Mehrajuddin, a resident of Kabul, who like many Afghans uses only one name.
Another man in the capital, Zahidullah, said the reported abuse was like atrocities committed by Soviet troops, who were driven out of Afghanistan in 1989 after a decade of occupation. He warned that the same could happen to American forces.
“Their future will be like the Russians,” Zahidullah said.

Pass the McCain Amendment.

This is now the best a defender of Bush can do. I have to say that it’s irritating when you’re criticized for not covering something. You can’t cover everything. So I’m reluctant to hammer some conservative sites for ignoring, condoning or looking the other way on the detainee-abuse issue. But I do find it staggering that National Review, for example, has maintained almost complete radio silence for weeks on the matter. I have no idea what their position on, say, the McCain Amendment is. If you only read NRO, you’d have no idea who Ian Fishback is. The Standard, at least, is prepared to acknowledge the matter – even if it’s after the evidence has become overwhelming. Meanwhile, the Catholic bishops have weighed in. You can download their petition in favor of the McCain Amendment here: it’s called “Letter to Senate on Prohibition of Torture.” It was issued October 4.

“The arguments for and against aborting babies who will be born with disabilities are not much different than the arguments for abortion in general. If you believe that the fetus is a person from the start, then the consistent position is not to abort babies with disabilities. After all, they are people, and just as you would not euthanise them after they were born, or as adults, you would not kill them before they are born. On the other hand, if you believe that the fetus is not yet a person, then deliberately allowing a disabled child to be born is akin to abuse. Just as you would not maim a child after it is born in order to cause mental or physical handicaps, you would also not allow such a child to form in the first place when you could avoid it.

Now, given that our nation is supposedly evenly divided about choice, the fact that so many fewer Downs babies are being born should tell you something about what anti-choicers do when actually confronted with such a situation.”

Some members of the right are angry at Grover Norquist. Guess why.

At seven months. It’s fine in Britain, as long as you’re acting “in good faith.” More discussion here.

Women are now 57 percent of all college students. I want to know why the left isn’t demanding affirmative action. I mean this is obvious sexism at work: anti-male sexism throughout the educational establishment. What else could explain, er, differences in test scores?

I’m not a lawyer and I’ve never been to law school. But even I know that there is no such thing as “the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause” as it relates to the Voting Rights Act. It appears that Harriet Miers is more clueless in this respect than I am. That is a very low bar for the Supreme Court. If this is the state of play, the hearings could be excruciating.

The DP already has the “Hung Up” song blasting through the apartment all day and half the night, and if it’s any indication of the rest of the album, it’s going to be superb. Madonna has always understood pop music in a way that most Americans don’t (I exclude gay men). By “pop,” I mean popular music that isn’t rock, country or hip-hop. So it’s unsurprising that the most ecstatic reviews for her new pop-dance album, “Confessions On A Dance Floor,” come from the culture that gets pop more than any other: Britain. We have almost a month more to wait?

“I was delighted today by your little plug for Futurama. Like you, I was never a big fan while it was on the air — never really paid much attention, actually. I was far more your standard Simpsons guy and Futurama just didn’t appear have the kind of zany, pop-culture-tweaking humor that I loved about the Simpsons (and whose writing has spiraled shamefully into total irrelevance the last few seasons). Futurama, like early-90’s Simpsons, was genius, and I love it more with every new episode I faithfully TIVO now. Fry and Bender are two of the most delightfully-written characters in TV and the senile malevolence of the Professor is up there as well.”

If you need further proof that this administration’s abandonment of clear Geneva guidelines has clearly undermined the war, then read this. The use of religion to taunt and torment the enemy has been going on for a long time now. From smearing inmates with fake menstrual blood, to desecrating the Koran, to forcing one Abu Ghraib prisoner to drink alcohol and eat pork, to burning Muslim corpses facing West … we now have a litany of abuses that are objectively evil and almost designed to lose us support among the broad Muslim population. And we have military academies that have been found to be over-run by religious zealots – and a leading general, Boykin, never disciplined for saying that ours is a war of the Christian God versus the Muslim God. When you do not stamp out religious bigotry at its base, when you give it a wink in politics and in warfare, you make these kinds of incidents inevitable. Pass the McCain Amendment.