Category: The Dish

Mill Valley, California, 6.30 am.

The love affair continues.

A reader writes:

Though your blog is frequently insightful, the post about Sri Lanka is idiotic. Why has not the Sri Lankan government received greater scrutiny from the MSM?

Well why have not the Sri Lankan people received any MSM coverage over the past two decades during which they have been victims of a degree of terrorism worse than anything Muslim fundametalists have yet to do. Yet we know about each Israeli who has been killed over the past decade.

The MSM will take interest in the Sri Lankan government probably after it starts taking an interest in Sri Lankan people.

"As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today’s feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews.
On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say. Instead of ‘I am woman, hear me roar’, there is a loud silence, punctuated only by remonstrations against Tony Blair and George Bush ‚Äî ‘the world’s number one terrorist’ as the marchers would have it," – my friend and colleague Sarah Baxter in the Sunday Times.

The usual suspects have deployed the usual rhetorical tropes against my questions about the evidence in the alleged terror plot based in Britain. Jeff Goldstein has me on an AIDS "dementia watch." Another had this charming metaphor:

Hell hath no fury like a man-bitch spurned.

They don’t even need a blood-level of 0.12, do they? A Malkin stand-in writes:

Of course, the fact that [Sullivan]’s hysterically arguing that there was no terror plot out of London makes his charges against me, let’s say slightly less believeable.

Well, read the post. I’m not arguing that "there was no terror plot". I’m asking questions about the evidence provided. So far: none. Maybe there’s an explanation for that – and we’ll find out in due course. But the Malkinian had previously written the following words in defense of torture in Pakistan:

An attack was imminent, and the information had to be obtained, no matter the method.

I have yet to read any evidence that an attack was "imminent". All the stories I’ve read have argued that the plot was for a dummy-run. Maybe Karol Sheinin has sources that I haven’t read. If she has, she should provide them, or correct her post. If she has a different understanding of the term "imminent," then it would be helpful for her to say so. My point about the use of torture is related to the reliability of the evidence. Torture is renowned for providing faulty information, even in totalitarian states whose techniques some conservatives now endorse. My question is about whether the evidence is indeed faulty. We don’t know. If there’s not much there and the British are forced to release the suspects without charging them, the backlash against Blair will be enormous. And that will make future counter-terrorism harder. I should add I don’t think I can be accused of disbelieving the potential of terrorists to strike again. I have a cover-story in the current New York Magazine premised on exactly that – on a far larger scale than anything alleged recently.

"Not one word about the Webb campaign’s dirty trick in having one of its volunteers, camcorder in hand, harrassing Allen as he campaigns around Virginia," – NRO’s Mark Levin, outraged that a racist remark in a public speech by GOP senator George Allen could actually be recorded by a political opponent. (Hat tip: Kevin.)

I guess if Bush and Rumsfeld had really hoped to reconstruct Iraq (and I now find that dubious, given the troop level they assigned), they might have found a better sub-constractor than Halliburton. Like, say, Hezbollah. Still, to give credit where it’s due, Bush has essentially handed what’s left of the Iraqi state to a Hezbollah clone in the Shiite south, so maybe the reconstruction will now actually begin – and serve the enemy’s propaganda message, rather than ours. And the beat goes on.

Guildford, England, 3 pm.

From Israel, we get the following headline:

Many Israelis Furious at How War Was Run

Didn’t they get the Cheney-Rumsfeld memo? Don’t they realize that, according to Joe Lieberman, no citizen in a democracy should criticize the conduct of a war while a terror threat is in place? Don’t they understand that their job is to support their political leadership at all times and that any criticism is simply playing into the hands of terrorists? And yet few in Israel are saying these things. Apparently, the Israeli democracy, a democracy that is barely fifty years old, is much more robust than America’s. America is too weak to allow its leaders to be criticized in wartime, its citizenry too pathetic to distinguish between assailing an administration for bungling a war to an almost comic extent and supporting terror – at least in the mind of Dick Cheney. Tom Friedman (TimesDelete) has the best response to Cheney’s brutally consistent incompetence:

If we‚Äôre in such a titanic struggle with radical Islam, and if getting Iraq right is at the center of that struggle, why did you ‘tough guys’ fight the Iraq war with the Rumsfeld Doctrine ‚Äî just enough troops to lose ‚Äî and not the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force to create the necessary foundation of any democracy-building project, which is security? How could you send so few troops to fight such an important war when it was obvious that without security Iraqis would fall back on their tribal militias?

Bottom line: Mr Cheney, you’re an incompetent wimp who didn’t have the will to win in Iraq, or the integrity to uphold American values while fighting a deadly foe. You have thereby made us all less safe, and stained the reputation of America for decades. Your incompetence and brutality have made us both less feared and more despised in the world. Why is that not the rallying cry for the opposition this fall?

(Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP.)

It’s Dennis Leary, the Red Sox, a Jewish first baseman, and Mel Gibson – from last night’s TV. Classic. Sublime. The best commentary on Gibson yet.

(Hat tip: Seth Mnookin’s great blog and Deadspin.)