Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

I read with interest your reader’s comparison of the GOP’s cynical attitude toward evangelical Christians with the Democrat’s attitude toward African Americans and homosexuals. There are some very real parallels there, but with one crucial difference: African Americans and homosexuals are part of historically oppressed groups. They will never forsake politics, because they cannot afford to.

I cannot say the same for the evangelicals. In spite of a persecution complex that the leaders of the Religious Right have been cultivating for years (the secularists are out to get us!), conservative Christians, as a group, have never really felt the sting of persecution. And although many of them have a fundamentalist streak, they also have something that I like to call "world-flight syndrome." As much as they’d like to change the world politically, there’s a big part of them that just wants to sit in their corner and pray for the apocalypse, pray that God will take them away from this world that they, secretly, hate and distrust. If they become disillusioned with the Republican Party, they will not hesitate to abandon politics and focus on saving souls.

The Republicans are in a tight spot: they can’t give the evangelicals what they want for fear of losing moderates and sane conservatives, but if they don’t give the evangelicals what they want, they’ll lose them, too. It happened once before, when conservative Christians tried to block evolution from entering public schools – after the Scopes Monkey Trial, many of them abandoned politics, only to be revived in the 80s by the Moral Majority. And it’s happening again.

Evangelicals may come back this November for more punishment, but in my opinion, it’s only a matter of time. What we’re seeing is the beginning of the end of the "values vote."

Reading Kim Jong Il’s fine print.

You want to know how the federal government thinks about the spouses of gay people? Congressman Gerry Studds’ legal husband will be denied all his spouse’s pension, thanks to Bill Clinton’s and the Republican Congress’ 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. The only other Congressional spouses treated this way are those convicted of treason, espionage or murder.

Yes, I feel rage. Rage at every politician who voted for the despicable bill, and rage at everyone who supported it.

Matthew Parris puts the boot in. He would be more persuasive if many neocons hadn’t been making the point about the botched execution of the war three years ago.

"I think the regime change policy established under Bill Clinton was the right policy. I think taking Saddam seriously after 9/11 was the right policy. But, of the many arguments in favor of toppling Saddam in 2001-2002 one of the most important — in my mind and, I believe, in the mind of many others — was that toppling the Iraq domino and standing-up a stable, democratically inclined government was supposed to be comparatively easy. The demonstration-effect argument has not panned out.

I believe we’re in for a long war on terror. I believe the Iraq war was ‚Äî and is ‚Äî part of the war on terror. But resources ‚Äî political, economic, military, diplomatic etc ‚Äî are finite. And, I find it hard to believe that if we knew everything we know now back then we would have agreed to allocate them in the same way. Of course you can pile counter-factual upon counter-factual. If we had that sort of perfect knowledge back then we would have handled the initial looting differently. We would have done all sorts of things differently. Fine, fine. But that’s basically my point. I’m all for being on offense. But I think in retrospect we called the wrong play. But simply because you called the wrong play doesn’t mean you walk off the field," – Jonah Goldberg, yesterday.

It’s hard to disagree with him. I’m well into the Woodward book now and what’s striking is how many people in the government warned very clearly that this was not going to be easy – and they were ignored or fired or lost traction in internal fighting. The interesting question – unanswerable but also essential to ask – is obvious, and has been wrestled with elsewhere. Was this project always doomed or did the execution doom it? I’m still struggling with that question. Woodward’s evidence suggests that the incompetence and recklessness – almost carelessness – at the top was so staggering that historians will have a hard time separating out the variables for failure. But it doesn’t mean it was ever "comparatively easy." I made the dumb error of thinking that the administration would never leap into such a scenario with no real plan for the aftermath. I made the error of believing these people had even a minimal sense of responsibility. My only defense is that I have tried to avoid that error ever since.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

Here’s the formulation the president laid out yesterday about Iraq:

"Our goal has not changed. Our goal is a country that can defend, sustain and govern itself, a country that which will serve as an ally in this war. Our tactics are adjusting."

I notice that the word "democracy" is missing.

I love them and they’re wildly popular, and please keep sending them. But please remember to put a place and time of day. Also: no pets or rainbows, or we open Hallmark’s box. And a window frame of some sort puts you way near the front of the line.

TNR’s Katherine Marsh asks:

When was the last time anyone even cared whether a male politician was happy with his life choices?

How about the day before in the same magazine, in a piece on Mark Warner by Ryan Lizza?

(Of course, I write this on a book tour in a hotel room in Wisconsin, missing my other half and the beagles, so maybe I’m just more touchy about life choices right now. But, you know, if you’re lucky to have a happy home, it sucks to abandon it).

No one said it better:

"On religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both.

I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ and ‘D.’ Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of ‘conservatism.’"

– Barry Goldwater, September 16, 1981.

A reader writes:

I urge you to see the Criterion Collection DVD of 1960’s Tunes Of Glory in which John Mills, as Lt. Col. Barrow, speaks of his having been waterboarded by his Japanese captors. Plainly, from Barrow’s words, it was known to the novelist, and screenwriter of the film, James Kennaway (a young ex-junior officer when he wrote the novel) that waterboarding is torture and that its psychological effect upon the tormented is profoundly painful and permanently harmful.

I shan’t spoil for you the plot or other details of the film, whose roles in it were regarded by both Sir Alec Guinness and Sir John Mills as the finest of their cinema careers. It is, I should only say, a haunting story unforgettably told by director Ronald Neame.

That’s what Netflix is for, innit?