Category: The Dish

Another sane American in a conservative paper draws the same sane conclusion as Jon Rauch:

People in power simply can’t be trusted. If we’re going to have a Republican executive branch, we need a Democratic legislature to hold its feet to the fire. And vice-versa.
So on Tuesday, I’m neither voting Democratic or Republican. I’m voting for the oldest party in the republic. Its name never appears on the ballot, but it’s always there and it has always served us well. Divided government.

If you’re a Republican concerned about national security who still (somehow) believes the Republicans are better at it, your president won’t change. But he will be forced out of denial and compelled to face reality. The Democrats, in a divided government, will also have to take responsibility for the hard choices involved in wartime. So divided government is win-win right now.

Vote Democratic next Tuesday, or if you just can’t, abstain. For the country’s sake – and for the soul of conservatism.

Not the president (who appoints the NSC). That’s his spin. Watch David spin. Spin, David, spin.

A reader writes:

I am a moderate living in Colorado Springs. The main thing that bothers me about those on the far right is their hypocrisy, with Ann Coulter and Ted Haggard being the latest two examples. Another comes to mind here locally as well:  ads for the local Republican candidate for the House that classify his opponent (a retired lieutenant colonel by the way) as a liberal, yet the administration that he is supporting has run up the greatest debt in our history.

I drive my kids and two of their friends to school in the morning and yesterday I was originally not supposed to pick my daughter’s friend up as she was to greet her father returning from Iraq.  She called and told us she needed a ride as they had evidently received a call that her dad would not be coming home yet, and we did not question as we were hoping nothing happened to him.  Today I believe that I saw the reason why.  Mr. Cheney will be here for a campaign stop this weekend part of which will be to greet the troops as they return.

So their reunion should be delayed for political purposes.

Yep. That sounds like Cheney to me. 

From the Washington Post today:

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets and that their release — even to the detainees’ own attorneys — "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage."

It couldn’t be because they would reveal the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy of torture and abuse, would it? I’ve said it before but the possibility that these three men will one day face charges of war crimes is a distinct possibility. Their desperate attempts now to hide what they have done in our name is predictable. If you re-elect them, their abuse of power will only metastasize, as torture always does.

National Review as occasionally a glorified press release from the Bush administration? Nahhh.

Stockholm, Sweden, 8.45 am.

The Harper’s profile from May 2005.

Another gay American, standing up for honesty and integrity. More, please. You know who you are.

(Photo: Getty Images.)

The theocon Pope gets modernity totally wrong:

The troubling truth is that on the most pressing issue currently facing the democratic governments of the West – how they should respond to the formidable challenge posed by militant Islam at home and abroad – Pope Benedict gets things exactly backward. Abandoning liberalism in favor of the strictly orthodox Catholicism favored by the Pope is the last thing Europe needs today. Such a development would almost certainly lead the continent back to a world of religiously inspired social and political strife – a world from which it only recently managed to extricate itself – while diminishing the chances that pluralism could ever make significant inroads in the Muslim world.

That Europe’s remarkable political and economic achievements over the past 60 years have been made possible in large part by its belated embrace of liberal ideals – including the ideal of public secularism – is something that Benedict seems not to appreciate or even comprehend. Luckily, his fellow Europeans appear to know better – to recognize that, far from being the source of our most intractable problems, liberalism remains our best hope for a solution.

And by liberalism, Damon Linker means freedom – of thought, conscience, speech and moral choices in private matters like heterosexual sex, first-trimester abortion, and the painful decisions families have to make about the end of life.

I go into hand-to-hand logical combat with the theocons on abortion, heterosexual sex and  end-of-life theology in Chapter Three of "The Conservative Soul."

Haggard on a secret gay life – to his own congregation. The man is in pain.