Category: The Dish

Washington, D.C., 8 am.

Deal with it, Mr President:

"John Kerry is awful, and anything we can do further to degrade his political prospects is worth doing. But really, I saw a clip of him making the much-deplored remark, and it was obvious that the dimwit in Iraq that he referred to was George W. Bush, not the American soldier. It was a dumb joke badly delivered, but his meaning was plain.  My pleasure in watching JK squirm is just as great as any other conservative’s, but something is owed to honesty.  There’s a lot of fake outrage going round here," – John Derbyshire, NRO.

On the last point, I absolutely agree. But, as I’ve written, the ad lib was obviously ambiguous – and there is, alas, a plausible inference to make it mean what some have jumped on. I understand why, if Kerry really didn’t mean that at all, he resists apologizing. I understand the rage at the cynicism of the way the right-wing machine has blown this out of all perspective.

But just as the president has to deal with reality, so does Kerry. The reality is that all the Bush machine needs for traction is a plausible inference – not even a probable one – and they have an issue. And that’s all Kerry needs to apologize for. It came out wrong. He can explain what he meant and still apologize if others interpreted it differently. And an apology like that kills this non-issue before it continues to obscure the life-and-death matters we have to deal with.

C.S. Lewis again:

"Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations…

The nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political programme can never in reality be more than probably right."

Four words: We. Do. Not. Torture.

The trouble is not that the president is evil. It is that he is utterly, absolutely convinced he is doing good. It’s a "no-brainer".

A new salvo from the Christianist-in-Chief.

While the media is obsessed parsing the ad libs of someone on no ballot this fall, something truly ominous has just happened in Iraq. The commander-in-chief has abandoned an American soldier to the tender mercies of a Shiite militia. Yes, there are nuances here, and the NYT fleshes out the story today. But the essential fact is clear. In a showdown for control of Baghdad, the Iraqi prime minister took orders from Moqtada al-Sadr, and instructed the U.S. military to withdraw from Sadr City. The American forces were trying both to stabilize the city but also to find a missing American serviceman. He is still missing. Money quote from the WaPo:

The move lifted a near siege that had stood at least since last Wednesday. U.S. military police imposed the blockade after the kidnapping of an American soldier of Iraqi descent. The soldier’s Iraqi in-laws said they believed he had been abducted by the Mahdi Army as he visited his wife at her home in the Karrada area of Baghdad, where U.S. military checkpoints were also removed as a result of Maliki’s action.

The crackdown on Sadr City had a second motive, U.S. officers said: the search for Abu Deraa, a man considered one of the most notorious death squad leaders. The soldier and Abu Deraa both were believed by the U.S. military to be in Sadr City.

The U.S. military does not have a tradition of abandoning its own soldiers to foreign militias, or of taking orders from foreign governments. No commander-in-chief who actually walks the walk, rather than swaggering the swagger, would acquiesce to such a thing. The soldier appears to be of Iraqi descent who is married to an Iraqi woman. Who authorized abandoning him to the enemy? Who is really giving the orders to the U.S. military in Iraq? These are real questions about honor and sacrifice and a war that is now careening out of any control. They are not phony questions drummed up by a partisan media machine to appeal to emotions to maintain power.

And where, by the way, is McCain on this? Silent on Cheney’s "no-brainer" on waterboarding. Silent recently on Iraq. But vocal – oh, how vocal – on Kerry. It tells you something about what has happened to him. And to America.

(Photo of an American soldier in Iraq – not the missing guy – by Yuri Kozyrev for Time.)

Laura Branigan’s "Self-Control." I have to say it is a near-perfect expression of the genre.

Because we desperately need some humor right now.

A reader writes:

John Kerry hits the nail on the head – and a mere day after it occurred to me for the first time how close I came to getting stuck in Iraq myself. Back in 1986 my poor parents worked their butts off to find some way to get me into a decent college. I had decent grades so money was the main problem. 

One of the potential ways around that money problem was – yep – ROTC. As it was, the powers that be wouldn’t let me into ROTC since my eyes weren’t that great, but that turned out to be a huge blessing. Had my parents ended up sticking me into military reserve service to get the funds that would send me to college, I might have ended up in Iraq – in Gulf War I, which started the year after I left college. Whew! A very very close call indeed.

Of course, if anyone dares speak the truth about military service – that many if not most people get into it not as a patriotic enterprise but as a lucrative job or source of job training, they get their heads lopped off by hateful attacks and slander. Some people went to Iraq because they really wanted to fight for our country there. But only some of them. Most just got stuck there. It’s high time people dropped the silly pretense and admitted it.

Andrew – don’t fall for the silly Karl Rove hype machine this time.

I’m not. But there is a real issue here – an ambiguous criticism of the troops – and it wouldn’t be hard to correct it. I intend to focus on the real issue right now: the failed war in Iraq. My reader worries about being sent to Iraq War I. But that war was waged by a competent, decent president, not an incompetent, indecent one. That’s the real issue in this election. And we owe it to the troops not to be distracted from it.

"It’s sad, so sad
It’s a sad, sad situation
And it’s getting more and more absurd."

What Kerry said he must apologize for. Sooner rather than later. He may not have meant it the way it came out. That doesn’t matter. It’s wrong to talk about the military that way – wrong morally, empirically and ethically. And the way he said it can be construed as a patronizing snub to the men and women whose lives are on the line. It’s also dumb politically not to kill this off in one news cycle. Is Kerry not content to lose just one election? Does his enormous ego have to insist on losing two?

(Photo: Charlie Niebergall/AP.)