Category: Old Dish

“The real reason her nomination sticks in the craw is the brass-and-leather whiff of the Praetorian Guard house. The ancient Praetorian Guard was an elite military unit that guarded Rome’s emperors and sometimes murdered them. The modern Praetorian Guard is the penumbra of family and cronies that, under the American imperial Presidency, is accorded unseemly attention and respect. Some Presidents look to it for actual officeholders. Bill Clinton put his wife in charge of health-care policy. John Kennedy put his brother in charge of the Justice Department. Mr. Bush seems to find the Praetorian Guard especially seductive. There were the Texas League Texans he sent to FEMA – Joe Allbaugh, Michael Brown. There was the way his running mate emerged from a search committee headed by – Dick Cheney. Look no further! Harriet Miers emerged in the same way, helping to vet judicial nominees. At least she tapped John Roberts before herself; gentlemen first. This is an elitism far more restrictive than anything Ms. Miers’ critics are charged with. Beltway/Ivy League elitism embraces anyone who works in the federal government, or who graduated from one of seven old colleges. The President’s elitism embraces anyone who works down the hall.” – Richard Brookhiser, arguably the smartest and most eloquent conservative writer around.

An emailer writes:

The only reason I see some credibility to the sexism charges is the reaction to Gonzalez. Save a token year on the Texas Supreme Court and a fancier law school, his credentials are similar to hers (some might say her district court clerkship gives her a leg up). And yet among the myriad charges levelled against Gonzalez, no one ever suggested, to my knowledge, that he was underqualified. I have a hard time explaining that double standard away.

Actually, I think that if Gonzales had been nominated, that question would have come up – along with his enmeshment with legalizing torture and expediting people to the death chamber with the efficiency and care of your average spammer. My guess is that Rove talked Bush out of Gonzales and, almost in a fit of pique, Bush picked Miers instead. But that’s a guess. I have no idea what the president’s motivations were in this odd pick. Neither, it appears, do his most die-hard supporters.

Yesterday, some 27 Iraqi civilans were murdered by insurgents in Tal Afar. Today, at least another 20 were. It’s worth recalling that Tal Afar was the object of U.S. military action only a month ago. The campaign was regarded as a success as far as it went, but as the New York Times explained, Rumsfeld’s refusal to commit enough troops to keep the peace in Iraq means that any victory was bound to be short-lived:

But as with previous battles, like those in Falluja and Qaim, a western city near Syria, a large number of insurgents also escaped the fight. That makes the battle, at least in some measure, the latest example of one of the most nettlesome problems faced in the war, what one marine in Anbar Province recently described as “punching a balloon”: American forces attack with overwhelming firepower only to have some insurgents leave and then return, or move on to fight elsewhere.

One year ago, Tal Afar was the scene of a major offensive to oust entrenched insurgents. After the battle, American commanders said the city was safe. But the military, stretched thin by demand for troops elsewhere, left fewer than 500 soldiers in Tal Afar and a surrounding area twice the size of Connecticut. Predictably, American officers said, the insurgents returned in force and were largely undisturbed until May, when Colonel McMaster’s unit, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, was reassigned from south of Baghdad to take back the region from insurgents.

And so it goes. What’s important to understand is that this is a deliberate policy. Although we were morally responsible for security in a country we invaded, we chose not to provide it. The argument was that it would look too much like an occupation, that we would infantilize the population, that our forces would intensify the insurgency, rather than impede it, and so on. The argument against was that rampant and tolerated disorder would only increase Iraqi paranoia about America’s true intentions, and provide more of an opening for the violent to seize power in a lawless country. What we are watching today are the consequences of the Rumsfeld decision. The question is whether a critical mass of Iraqis can rescue their own country from the chaos the occupation provoked and appears incapable of suppressing. When observers call George W. Bush a gambler, they aren’t kidding.

NANO-SKINS: A possible fix for that scratchy plastic on the surface of your iPod nano.

HIV AND THE BRAIN: The virus lurks in the brain, which is protected by a blood barrier that is more resistant to medication than much of the rest of the body. (Your balls are similarly protected.) The good news is that we now have much better understanding of how HIV slowly damages motor coordination and some language and reasoning skills. We can monitor the virus’s effects more accurately. The bad news is that I’ll now get more than one email a day saying I have AIDS dementia. Oh well.

Her evangelical Protestantism doesn’t end the debate. 34 percent of evangelicals are pro-choice, while personally opposed to abortion. The First Lady is pro-Roe and was one of Miers’ key backers. Pro-life blogger Paul Deignan looks at the record here and here. I’ve long doubted that a shrewd Republican president would want to see Roe over-turned. It’s too useful for voter turn-out and direct mail. So what we’re seeing is an inevitable clash between the party’s elite realists and its grass-roots true believers. That’s what makes this such an interesting moment.

The news from Iraq today is about as good as one can hope for right now. Some Sunni leaders have been enticed to support the Constitution on the understanding that they have a few months to finesse it after the vote. It’s a messy, fraught and unsatisfying compromise, which is to say it’s politics. Politics, recall, is what Iraq hasn’t really had for thirty years. Under Saddam, it had tyranny backed by sadism and corruption. The politics that existed was the politics of internal mafia disputes. Now we actually have negotiation, brinksmanship, and the astonishingly resolute refusal of the Shiite leadership to be drawn into civil war by Zarqawi’s brutal slaying of Shiite Muslims. There’s even evidence that al Qaeda’s leadership understands that terror attacks on mosques might actually undermine Jihadism and so are trying to restrain Zarqawi. None of this, of course, guarantees ultimate success. But the whole point of this war was to transform a region ruled by fear into a region ruled by consent. We’d be foolish to believe this could happen overnight; and we’ve been criminally negligent in not providing the security that is indispensable to a successful transition. But given Rumsfeld’s refusal to pacify the country, this violence-strewn mess is our best hope. And hope there still is.

Musement Park has a suggestion on the hacker’s identity.

Whoever Dafydd is, Karl Rove needs to hire him pronto for the White House’s p.r. department. If you can spin a mili-second’s pause in a television interview, you can spin anything.

Okay, I have my suspects. Just kidding. Apologies for what just happened. I’ve had bronchitis for the past few days so got up a little later than usual to find the sweet little message. My site-manager and server-manager are looking into it. I’ll keep you posted.

Yes, I know the plastic scratches. But I couldn’t help myself and bought two new iPod nanos for me and the DP. I got a black one. Technically, they’re no better than my old iPod, and actually contain fewer songs. Aesthetically, they’re irresistible. More grist for Virginia. I know I’m guilty of hypocrisy since I’ve whined about what iPod culture is doing to social interaction (while admitting at the time that I was an addict). I’m also guilty of pure consumerism. I just like the look and feel of the thing. Beautiful things need no utilitarian defense. What Apple understands is that beauty matters for its own sake; indeed, that beauty is ultimately all I was buying. In an often ugly world, that’s good enough for me.

More evidence that Bush’s education reform is helping.