Category: The Dish

"The fundamental problem congressional Republicans are experiencing now is that they have almost no moral capital left after the last two years. Again and again, when given the choice to reform their practices or do little or nothing, they always picked the latter. On travel, on Abramoff, on earmarking — you name it. The impression they always gave was that the integrity of the institution and the public interest had to take a back-seat to their own convenience.

They wanted to squeak by this year on gerrymandering, negative ads, and money, and just might have succeeded‚Äîhad nothing more gone wrong. Well, now it has and people feel confirmed in what they always suspected about this Congress‚Äîthat it is unable to police its own practices and is full of people who don’t follow the same rules as the rest of us. This is deadly. So, in one sense, the best way to have coped with the fall-out of the Foley scandal would have been long before the Foley scandal ever broke, when all the other scandals were breaking. Then, congressional Republicans would have had some reserve of credibility to fall back on. Now they have very little," – Rich Lowry, National Review Online.

(Photo: Lauren Victoria Burke/AP.)

The Washington Blade’s Kevin Naff editorializes about Mark Foley – and throws a side-shot at yours truly.

A reader writes:

Gay men belong in the closet. It is better for gay men, and it is better for the rest of us.

You are as good an example of this as I can find. The sexual behavior of gay men is a threat to the public health, as the AIDS epidemic made clear. I’m not about to pretend that gay men behave sexually as straights do.

The old paradigm of living in the closet and marriage to a fag hag is better for gay men, and it is better for the rest of us, too. Relationship to a woman is the only way to constrain the sexual behavior of men. The sexual behavior of gay men must be constrained.

There is no civil rights issue involved in any of this. You are seriously deceiving yourself. You’re just a spoiled child living in a society in which the men have collapsed and can no longer assert their authority.

This will change in the future. No society can continue to survive with gay men living without constraint. And, no society can long endure under the authority of the fag hags. The world of the fags and the fag hags is disgusting. There is something called reality.

I don’t think we should throw men in jail for f***ing each other in the ass. But, we certainly shouldn’t encourage it either. We should push you and your like back into the closet where you belong. Hope it happens soon.

Ah yes, getting gay men to marry women. That helps. Ask Jim McGreevey – and the countless black women who have gotten AIDS because their gay husbands can’t deal honestly with their sexual orientation. As for the personal attack, sure I have HIV. And, sure, I’ve had my share of sex. I don’t begrudge that to anyone, gay or straight. But I’m also an example of someone who was eventually lucky enough or persistent enough to find love and to get engaged. I’ve never been so happy in my private life. There are times when I think I’ve become a victim of my own arguments. And I’m glad of it. And if you think you will succeed in taking these opportunities and freedoms away from us, think again. We’re going nowhere. We fought for these freedoms, generation by generation, over the ashes of hundreds of thousands of our loved ones. Retreat is not an option.

Great Cacapon, West Virginia, 4 pm.

Yesterday, David Brooks and I had a very lively and productive debate about what has gone wrong with conservatism in America and how to fix it. The event was sponsored by the CATO Institute. We agreed on some; and disagreed vehemently on some. We also responded to some provocative questions and challenges from the packed crowd. David homed in one some of the weak spots in my book and I did my best to respond. I think it was a debate that actually fostered more light than heat. Imagine that.

You can watch a live-stream video of the event here. Or you can listen to an audio MP3 file; or download the debate onto your iPod on the same page.

To my mind, Iraq and Afghanistan should be the central issue in this campaign. We need to talk more about IEDs than IMs. The news from both Iraq and Afghanistan is dreadful and disturbing. There are reports of a suicide bombing cell in Kabul and a serious risk of losing the South of that country to the Taliban. In Iraq, the latest effort to bring order to Baghdad, the minimal amount necessary to stabilize the country, appears to be failing. This is despite a real commitment of resources to the capital, more U.S. troops and a systematic sweep of bad neighborhoods. Money quote:

An intensified U.S.-Iraqi military sweep launched in Baghdad in August has been clearing neighborhoods house by house of weapons, militiamen and insurgents.

Despite the sweep, the capital continues to see a deadly combination of attacks by Sunni insurgents and tit-for-tat killings and bombings by Shiite militias and Sunni groups, which have killed thousands this month.

The American fatalty rate just jumped. The fundamental issue is whether the "government" there has any monopoly of violence, which makes it possible for US troops to delegate responsibility for public order. It appears it doesn’t. Even government ministers backed by their own militias are finding it hard to control them as sectarian mayhem advances. At some point, the U.S. will have few people to talk to in order to restore order, let alone a functioning state. Here’s another deeply troubling statistic I found in the NYT today:

A government organization responsible for overseeing Shiite mosques issued a report on Tuesday that offered another window into the sectarian violence that has plagued Iraq since the destruction of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February.

In the two and a half years before then, going back to August 2003, there were only 80 attacks on Shiite mosques, the report said. In the eight months since the Samarra bombing, there have been 69. More than 1,700 people have been killed in such attacks since 2003.

All of this forces us to making the toughest decision yet. The status quo is unacceptable. We must either ratchet up our effort or cut our losses. If I had confidence in the leadership, I’d back the former. Under Rumsfeld, I have zero confidence in any effort to stabilize Iraq. But we know this president is simply immune to pressure unless forced. So vote Democrat. Give them partial responsibility for the war effort – before a presidential election. And force Bush finally to take some responsibility for the chaos he has helped create.

(Photo: Yuri Kozyrev/Time.)

Fox News is fair and balanced as usual – and Mark Foley is labeled as a Democrat.

"The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism, and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds that it would deem vile if they were done by any other," – Louis de Bernieres, "Birds Without Wings."

The Democrats just released the following pic via email:

A reader corrects:

Please, the massacre in Pennsylvania is NOT getting ignored (it led NBC’s Nightly news) thanks to the Foley scandal.

What IS getting the short shrift is what is actually happening in Iraq (17 soldiers/Marines killed over the weekend, 50 plus bodies turning up in the capital despite a blanket curfew for Baghdad that included pedestrians, British soldier killed in Basra area) and Afghanistan (2 more U.S. soldiers killed in Kunar province; 2 more Canadian soldiers killed in Kandahar; over 300 schools closed in southern Afghanistan due to Taliban threats).

I stand corrected. What I meant to say is that most of Washington was consumed with the Foley story, not the Amish murders. And my sloppy writing probably reveals my own complicity in that more than anything else.