Category: The Dish

I’ve never found New Year’s Day a very interesting occasion. It tends to be cold and dark, comes just after the ordeal of Christmas, and you tend to be surrounded by drunks. But early September really is the time I feel a new year beginning. I guess I’m still a student at heart, eager for the new term. It’s cold and rainy in Provincetown this Sunday, but there’s still a sense of newness in the air.

My break was wonderful. I didn’t look at the internets for ten days. I read no blogs. In Amsterdam, the most contact I had with the outside world was the European version of the Financial Times. It’s the most relentlessly tedious newspaper I have ever read. But they delivered it to my hotel room each morning, and I was able to keep up with various Belgian bank mergers, which was oddly comforting in a world approaching Armageddon. Amsterdam was a trip, as you might expect, hanging with an old friend and the South Park gang. I’m sorry to say I remember very little about any of it, except it was extremely beautiful, and it is unwise to eat the space cakes. It was nonetheless eye-opening to visit a free country, compared with the U.S. Observing people actually allowed to relax over a joint and a cappuccino in a coffee-house, or buy some soul-expanding mushrooms at small, regulated stores as common as Starbucks was a reminder that not every society is terrified of pleasure or freedom or happiness. I’d like to offer my deepest thanks to David, Michael and Ana-Marie for filling in for me so ably while I was gone. It’s great to be back.

Since I believe Andrew has copyrighted the term "YouTube of the Day," I won’t use it; but this video (via Tom Tomorrow) deserves to be seen by every bright-eyed boy and girl.

by David Weigel

Is there any possible political downside to a Democratic attack on Donald Rumsfeld? I don’t think so.

Under assault from Republicans on issues of national security, congressional Democrats are planning to push for a vote of no confidence in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this month as part of a broad effort to stay on the offensive ahead of the November midterm elections.

In Rumsfeld, Democrats believe they have found both a useful antagonist and a stand-in for President Bush and what they see as his blunders in Iraq. This week, Democrats interpreted a speech of his as equating critics of the war in Iraq to appeasers of Adolf Hitler, an interpretation that Pentagon spokesman Eric Ruff disputed. But Democrats said the hyperbolic attack would backfire.

Rumsfeld has been the least popular figure in the administration for a while now; a few months ago, only 67 percent of Republicans thought he deserved to keep his job. The pro-war spin that Rumsfeld’s "I’m OK, you’re an appeaser" speech would redound to the GOP’s benefit came from a belief that the "Islamofascist" meme was going to breathe new life into the administration’s popularity; I think the meme was tainted by association with the Defense Secretary and his catastrophic tenure in office. It’s more likely that Republicans will get on the "dump Rumsfeld" train than they’ll make hay and fight Democrats over it.

By Michael J. Totten

KARNI TERMINAL, ISRAEL-GAZA BORDER — The Israeli Defense Forces found and collapsed a 200 meter-long and 12 meter-deep tunnel one kilometer inside the Gaza Strip that terrorists intended to reach all the way into Israel. The tunnel was located near the Karni Terminal, a now-closed crossing point for goods and material from Israel into Gaza. Gun battles erupted near the entrance to the tunnel before the charges were detonated as tanks guarded the terminal itself. 20 gunmen were killed.

“The plan was to use the tunnel for suicide bombings at Karni,” IDF Major Tal Lev-Ram told me as we heard sub-machine gun fire in the distance. “I can’t understand it. Karni is their lifeline, their life. This is the biggest reason we closed it. It’s hard to understand why they keep doing these things at the crossing points unless they are trying to make life harder in Gaza.”

Two months ago Palestinian police stopped a car bomber heading toward Karni. Six months ago the IDF stopped three terrorists with M-16s, grenades, and suicide bomb belts at the Erez crossing point where people, rather than goods, transit into and out of Gaza.

On June 25 of this year, eight terrorists used a tunnel much like the one just found near Karni to kidnap the young Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and steal him away into Gaza. The tanks guarding Karni belong to his unit.

Click here to see a video clip of the tunnel’s controlled collapse.

by David Weigel

John Tabin sees gas prices falling and wonders how this will affect the Great Democratic Comeback of 2006.

The funny thing about Bush is how closely his approval ratings correlate to gas prices. So if it’s true that the price at the pump is poised to keep falling for months, shouldn’t we be more optimistic about the GOP’s fortunes this November?

I think so. I posed this to a few Republicans at an America’s Future Foundation happy hour last night, and their eyes lit up like I’d just told them Rick Santorum had free tickets to Springsteen and wanted them to come with. It’s a cliche at this point, but it’s also completely true that shelling out $50 to fill a tank of gas has convinced most Americans, against all the macro evidence, that the economy sucks. A sudden 50 cent-per-gallon drop in that price by November would completely change that mentality. Good thing there’s absolutely zero chance of a crisis in the Middle East in the next 68 days.

by David Weigel

Steve Sailer has two long, good exegeses (one, two) on war and the national need for territory. The first post collects some general thoughts:

There just aren’t that many empty spots on the map anymore, the way the San Francisco Bay Area, perhaps the finest spot for human habitation on earth, was practically empty in 1845.

Moreover, the spread of the idea of nationalism from Europe to the rest of the world, replacing dynasticism as the reigning assumption, means that the kind of easy occupations that, say, the British enjoyed in India for so long just aren’t feasible. If the masses assume that who rules them is none of their business, then it’s pretty easy for an outsider to take over. But, nowadays, everybody believes that their rulers should be, more or less, from among them.

In his follow-up Sailer unveils another one of his Theories – the mostly seamless historical or demographic trends that no one else ever seems to pick up. (They’re too busy comparing everything to 1938, if they’re talking war, and 1994, if they’re talking politics.)

Sailer’s Dirt Theory of War: In the past, when thinking about whom to conquer, the    key fact was that most of the value of the potential conquest was in the dirt acquired. You could use the ground to raise crops or mine for valuable minerals, which made up two large parts of the economy back in the good old days. War couldn’t hurt dirt. Conquering California in the 1840s, for example, did almost zero damage to the place, which turned out, immediately afterwards, to have lots of gold in the ground.

… most fighting around the world these days is conducted less like Grant vs. Lee and more like the Corleones rubbing out the rival families at the end of the The Godfather. It’s less honorable, and less destructive, but more profitable.

This clarifies what’s been nagging at me when I hear the members of our executive branch compare the current crisis to an old, good war, like World War II. These people know, as much as Sailer knows, that preventing Muslim terrorists from blowing up airplanes or buildings or cities is a matter of police work and dirty work – like the Corleones rubbing out rivals, but also like a pre-White House Jack Ryan taking out his villain of the week. They know this and, for political reasons, obfuscate it. They pretend this is an old-fashioned army-vs-army war. But that leads to cognitive dissonance on a mass scale when the population, which is willing to support the war, and willing to send family members to fight it, doesn’t see clear-cut victories; isn’t asked to sacrifice anything; doesn’t know when the war will end.

by David Weigel

I don’t know what prompted this sudden burst of negativity, but Teddy Roosevelt gets no respect – not from libertarians, not from paleolibertarians. Three years back, Michael McMenamin made the case that TR proved the folly of military adventures.

by David Weigel

The Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin, Mark "not that one" Green, has been ordered to give back half a million dollars in donations he had reeled in while running for Congress. State law allows Green to use the money, but the partisan Wisconsin election board passed a rule… well, just read it.

Wednesday’s actions were in response to a complaint brought by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which alleged Green should be subject to an "emergency rule" the board passed prohibiting candidates for state office from converting funds from prior federal campaigns if the donors are not registered in Wisconsin or the gifts exceed state limits.

The Elections Board, which is dominated by Democrats, first adopted the rule in 2005, one day after Green transferred his federal money to his state account.

The rule was quickly suspended by a committee of the Republican-controlled Legislature. But the full Legislature never adopted the required follow-up legislation to permanently kill the rule before lawmakers went home July 12.

Anyone care to explain why the election board’s Libertarian member voted to screw Green?

by David Weigel

This column in the American Spectator by Jeffrey Lord is pretty interesting, revisiting a race that no one much discusses anymore – the 1942 midterm elections. Lord is right that the GOP flourished – as it had stayed afloat in FDR’s third win of 1940 – by sticking with FDR on the war and differentiating itself on domestic policy. And then Lord banks left and takes the Rumsfeld Expressway into False Equivalence City.

So in circumstances like this, how does a political opposition approach the upcoming election? Savage FDR? Run on a campaign of "Roosevelt lied and people died"? Should they go out and tell the American people just how dangerously incompetent the man was, that the best thing to do was make peace with Hitler and Japan’s Hirohito, then elect Republicans who would simply force FDR to bring home the boys and let the rest of the world cope with chaos? After all, a few years earlier FDR himself had turned back an ocean liner filled with 937 Jews escaping the looming Holocaust. The idea of not making Hitler, Hirohito or Mussolini any angrier than they were was certainly one approach.

This is cute, and it would be relevent if the 2006 Democratic Party was running on a platform of making peace with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, appeasing Iran, and ending the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. It’s not, obviously. They don’t really have plans for dealing with al Qaeda and Iran, which is part of their problem, but the general Democratic stance on those issues is expressed here by Ohio U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown:

Despite the sacrifice and bravery of our troops, the foreign policy of Republicans in Congress and the White House has failed to secure our interests at home and abroad:
– Osama bin Laden is still on the loose and Afghanistan has reemerged as a haven for terrorists and opium producers.
– While we have been distracted by the insurgency in Iraq, Iran and North Korea have gained ground in their effort to posses weapons of mass destruction.

Will voters appreciate that Democrats have decoupled the war in Iraq and the war on terror – that they want to pull out of the former and more aggressively (they say) pursue victory in the latter? I think so. And so do some Republicans.

by David Weigel

I’m pretty tolerant of the racial gaffes that bubble up into the political news cycle every month or so. I was proud to defend Joe Biden for saying, basically, that Indian Americans in Delaware are successful franchise entrepreneurs. But this comment by Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) was beyond the pale.

At the campaign event with [First Lady Laura] Bush, Burns talked about the war on terrorism, saying a "faceless enemy" of terrorists "drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night."

The campaign said Thursday that the senator was simply pointing out terrorists can be anywhere.

Sorry, no, he wasn’t pointing that out. You don’t pluck "drive taxi cabs" out of the air when you’re thinking of a generic job that terrorists might do. That’s a job that Arabs and South Asians disproportinately do. They don’t do it in Montana, though, because Montana only has 5,508 Asians. They do it in DC and in New York City, and Burns is scared of brown people in places like that: He told a reporter in 1994 that living amongst swarthy African-Americans in DC was "a hell of a challenge."