Category: The Dish

Jon Rauch is, as always, thinking realistically and imaginatively. In my view, an aggressive U.S. domestic effort to move away from oil-addiction toward biofuels would be one of the most effective weapons against Ahmadinejad we could deploy. And only a serious increase in gas taxes will do the trick. Hence what amounts to Bush’s appeasement of Iran: until he tackles our energy policy and upsets his big oil base, he’s enabling Islamist terror. Olivier Roy’s essay of a couple weeks back is also worth re-reading.

The moon-landing – as transcribed by the Onion. The audio is obscene, so don’t click if you have problems with the f-word.

Before I left for Amsterdam, I’d written several posts about my skepticism with respect to the London terror plot, a plot described by Michelle Malkin’s blog as "imminent," and thereby warranting torture. The posts can be read here, here, and here. The British officials also spoke of the plot in near-apocalyptic terms at the time. Now we find out something a little different:

In addition to Mr. Stephenson’s remark that the attack would have been "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," Mr. Reid said that attacks were “highly likely” and predicted that the loss of life would have been on an "unprecedented scale."

Two weeks later, senior officials here characterized the remarks as unfortunate. As more information was analyzed and the British government decided that the attack was not imminent, Mr. Reid sought to calm the country by backing off from his dire predictions.

So there was no imminent threat at all. And, although, as I wrote, the plot was real, it was being monitored very closely with secret police cameras in the room where bomb materials were to be assembled at some point. The decision to shut down Britain’s airports was made out of some kind of fear of another, completely unsubstantiated and alleged plot. Money quote:

British officials said the suspects still had a lot of work to do. Two of the suspects did not have passports, but had applied for expedited approval. One official said the people suspected of leading the plot were still recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers.

While investigators found evidence on a computer memory stick indicating that one of the men had looked up airline schedules for flights from London to cities in the United States, the suspects had neither made reservations nor purchased plane tickets, a British official said.

Hmmm. No tickets; no ready-for-use bombs; no passports for some; close surveillance … then panic. Could it be that torture in Pakistan produced false evidence (as it almost always does) and so ended what might have been a more effective counter-terror operation? We’ll never know. I just hope that the premature action against these Jihadists has not jeopardized the chances of prosecuting them. If torture was integral to their arrests, then they may have to be released. I await a retraction from the Malkin blog; and an apology from Jeff Goldstein who accused me of "dementia" for doubting the original official line. It was not dementia prompting my doubts. It was the evidence, something some on the far right seem uninterested in. If we want to win the war on Islamist terror, we need to be as reality-based as possible.

(Photo: Michael Dwyer/AP.)

Paris, France, 7 am.

"I had the opportunity this afternoon to be part of a relatively small group who heard President Bush talk, extemporaneously, for around forty minutes. It was an absolutely riveting experience. It was the best I’ve ever seen him. Not only that; it may have been the best I’ve ever seen any politician. If I summarized what he said, it would all sound familiar: the difficult times we live in; the threat from Islamic fascism – the phrase drew an enthusiastic round of applause – the universal yearning for freedom; the need to confront evil now, with all the tools at our disposal, so that our children and grandchildren can live in a better and safer world. As he often does, the President structured his comments loosely around a tour of the Oval Office. But the digressions and interpolations were priceless. The conventional wisdom is that Bush is not a very good speaker. But up close, he is a great communicator, in a way that, in my opinion, Ronald Reagan was not. He was by turns instructive, persuasive, and funny. His persona is very much that of the big brother," – John Hinderaker, hailing the Great Leader, and the need to be on guard against bourgeois counter-revolutionaries suffering from false consciousness.

I promise I didn’t insert or invent the analogy to Big Brother. That must be one of the most revealing Freudian slips comrade Hinderaker has made in a long time.

The antidote to Rove?

Cawsand, Cornwall, England, 10 am, in peak summer.

Deservedly tossed from TNR.

A new movie from Israel, not yet released in the U.S., is about the place where the West’s freedoms are most directly engaged with the medieval barbarism of Islamist jihad. One reason I am unapologetic about my support for Israel, despite its many flaws and errors, is that it is on the front line of freedom.

Here’s John Derbyshire on "The Conservative Soul:"

Sullivan is broadly right about conservatism. For the preservation of liberty, the skeptical, dry, philosophically modest conservatism that Sullivan argues for is a much better bet than any system based on a belief that human beings, or their societies, can be transformed by state power.

That’s what the book is about. Derb then argues that the rest of the book is about being gay and Catholic. Just for the record (and this may be because Derb only skimmed much of the book): there is almost no discussion of the subject in the book. There is a serious attempt to describe a Christianity that is not fundamentalist, but that non-fundamentalist faith applies to everyone, gay, straight, male, female, young, old, and of every race and culture. Yes: it’s an argument for a Christianity based in love, sacrament, mystery, compassion and humility; it is an argument against excessive doctrinal obsession, minute moral regulation, and constant guilt. I have a feeling that many heterosexual Christians will understand what I’m getting at.

The book, due out October 2, can be pre-ordered here.