Category: The Dish

This blog’s favorite free-lance Middle East correspondent, Michael Totten, writes:

Obviously Hezbollah started this and Hezbollah is the main problem. Not only did they drag my second home into a war, the bastards also threatened me personally. So I hardly see the point in telling you what I think about them right about now. I’ll get to them later.

I sympathize one hundred percent with what Israel is trying to do here. But they aren’t going about it the right way, and they’re punishing far too many of the wrong people. Lord knows I could be wrong, and the situation is rapidly changing, but at this particular moment it looks bad for Israel, bad for Lebanon, bad for the United States, good for Syria, and good for Iran.

I’m not so sure. The news today that leading Arab states have actually condemned Hezbollah and that Iraq’s Sunni minority is now hoping that U.S. troops will stay longer adds to the changing dynamic in the Middle East. What we may be seeing is a nascent, wider regional war between Sunni and Shi’a, triggered by Iraq, fomented by an increasingly belligerent Iran, and portending what could be a far more explosive and long-lasting Muslim civil war. This is to over-simplify, of course. There are many nuances here. Syria and Iran are uncomfortable allies ideologically. But if the Syrian regime needs Islamism to cling temporarily to power, I guess they’ll use it. All of this is troubling and dangerous, but also clarifying and, as with all such developments, subject to improvisational and tactical exploitation. Maybe the new closeness between the Iraqi Sunnis and the U.S. could be the critical breakthrough for a national government that can restrain the Shiite militias. Maybe the growing power of Iran might prompt the Saudis to be more cooperative with the U.S. on critical intelligence matters. Maybe, as my colleague Joe Klein speculates, this is really about an internecine power struggle in Iran between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei:

If this was an Ahmadinejad ploy, it might well backfire. The Israeli response has seriously damaged Lebanon economically. The Lebanese patchwork of constituencies that governs the country may now conclude that it can no longer tolerate a heavily armed Hizballah substate in the south. And if it can be proved that Iran instigated the mess, the members of the U.N. Security Council might be nudged toward a tougher stance on the nuclear issue‚Äîand the threat of international sanctions, which could have terrible consequences for Iran’s oily economy.

I guess what I’m saying is that the situation is far too fluid to come to any quick decisions, or to prompt any hasty actions. But it may yield new openings we can exploit. This is when subtle statecraft can be most effective. Over to you, Zalmay.

(Gaza photo by Hatem Moussa/AP.)

An obit that does this contemporary incarnation of Jesus proud. From the Springfield Missouri News-Leader, the money quote about the Enron years:

In 1984, Ken accepted the position as Chairman and CEO of Houston Natural Gas Co., which merged with InterNorth in 1985, and which would later be renamed Enron Corp. Ken loved Enron, and saw the company as one of limitless possibilities. He often talked of the incredible talent at Enron and believed that the Enron employees were unsurpassed in any industry. Ken believed the real value of Enron was in its people. From the most junior employee to his top executives, Ken treated all with the same dignity and respect they deserved as children of God. Employees often remarked on how he recalled their names, family, and other personal details they shared with him. "I, the Lord, search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve." Jeremiah 12:10 For those who know and love Ken, we take comfort in the knowledge that he is in the loving presence of the one true Judge.

And so history is airbrushed into Christianist fantasy. Just like the Stalinists. Nowhere in the obit is there any mention of his crimes. My take on Saint Ken and his patron, George W. Bush, can be read here.

(Update: it behooves me to note that this obit was a paid one by Lay supporters, and not the work of independent journalists.)

Greg Djerejian, a conservative of the reality-based variety, is on a roll. First, a sad review professor Reynolds on foreign policy, then a rebuke to Christianist, Hugh Hewitt. Vive la resistance.

"The US government is, indeed, bankrupt, insofar as it will be unable to pay its creditors, who, in this context, are current and future generations to whom it has explicitly or implicitly promised future net payments of various kinds," – Professor Laurence Kotlikoff for the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, a leading constituent of the US Federal Reserve.

Richard Epstein weighs in on the Bush-Cheney innovation of countless signing statements, designed to remove legislative and potentially judicial checks on executive power. Epstein is a limited government conservative with libertarian leanings. Hence his resistance to King George. Money quote:

Modern understanding of judicial review requires the executive branch to take its marching orders from the Supreme Court. Signing statements, I fear, could be the opening wedge to a presidential posture that judicial decisions may limit the president’s ability to use courts to enforce his policies, but cannot stop him from acting unilaterally. On this theory, the president could continue to order wiretaps and surveillance in opposition to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after a court had determined that he has exceeded his powers–he just couldn’t use the evidence acquired in court. Different branches of government have different views of the law, yet the executive marches on. A major check on executive power goes by the boards.

Vive la resistance. Scalia, of course, has dutifully backed the logic behind the "signing statements" in his Hamdan dissent. We are one Supreme Court Justice away from an executive above the law, and able to interpret it retroactively as s/he sees fit.

I guess I should belatedly comment on the much-cited piece about gay intolerance toward straights and others in Provincetown. My main response is: duh. Why would anyone think gay people would be any less prone to bigotry or intolerance than any other human beings? They’re … human. Prejudice is ugly wherever it comes from, and gays are no exception. Toleration is a difficult virtue. It comes no more naturally to minorities than majorities – although minorities have often had to master it in self-defense.

All I can say is that as a longtime summer resident of this little town brimming with award-winning fudge and mannish women (in Dina Martina’s immortal words), it’s full of personal feuds but remarkably tolerant of group differences. We’re talking Jamaican laborers, post-drag drag-queens, bearded ladies, senior transgendered people, interracial couples, straight families, Portuguese-American clans, Irish cops, circuit queens, jolly bears, cross-dressers, rabid racoons, bustling skunks, countless dogs, power-lesbians, Bulgarian students, gay families with kids, Russian entrepreneurs, ancient eccentrics, nocturnal painters, bad musicians, cult film-makers, elegant novelists, excitable pundits … well, you get the idea. Cram them onto two streets, add summer heat, and all you get is a few random slurs? If only they could be so "intolerant" everywhere else.

Glenn Reynolds airs many of the important points and calmly keeps asking the right questions, it seems to me. His responses are among the sanest I have read on the topic. I agree with him that this issue emerged before many people were ready to deal with it. But, having watched this close up from the beginning, I know this was not a decision made by the leading gay groups. At the beginning and throughout the 1990s, the gay establishment fought marriage rights passionately and treated marriage advocates as cranks. HRC did all it could to prevent this issue from dominating the discourse. They did the polling, like all principled Democrats, and wanted to play to their strengths. No gay group agreed to take the first real marriage suit in Hawaii. It took a straight guy from the ACLU to handle it. The Human Rights Campaign’s leadership refused to speak of the matter for years, and only included the m-word in their literature in the last few years. Major Democratic donors also refused – and Bill Clinton talked them out of it, when necessary.

The trouble was: gay spouses found themselves barred from each others’ hospital rooms in the 1980s and 1990s during the AIDS crisis, lesbian mothers had their children taken away from them, long-standing de facto marriages had family members rescind their inheritance rights, and gay consciousness evolved to the point where such scond class status rankled deeper and deeper. It was ordinary people, ordinary couples who pioneered this movement. This push emerged organically as society changed. Such pushes are always "before their time" – all social change is premature at some point. The key is to stay rational, engage the debate, see what the courts, legislatures and governors do, and let federalism do its work. I’m grateful – and so are many gay people and their families – to sane straight guys like Reynolds for standing up for this.

And other weirdnesses in the new religious landscape. My take in the Sunday Times (of London) today.

Staring-Down as a competitive sport. Don’t blink!

It has entered a more intense phase in the Middle East. Worried? Terrified? Fear not. Just drop by "Rapture Ready" website and you’ll feel cheered up. The Christianists can’t wait for the bombs to go off. Money quote:

"Is it time to get excited? I can’t help the way I feel. For the first time in my Christian walk, I have no doubts that the day of the Lords appearing is upon us. I have never felt this way before, I have a joy that bubbles up every-time I think of him, for I know this is truly the time I have waited for so long. Am I alone in feeling guilty about the human suffering like my joy at his appearing somehow fuels the evil I see everywhere. If it were not for the souls that hang in the balance and the horror that stalks man daily on this earth, my joy would be complete. For those of us who await his arrival know, somehow we just know it won’t be long now, the Bridegroom cometh rather man is ready are not."

That poster’s name is "ohappyday". Tom Lehrer, alas, is retired. Blogger Jonathan Swift comments here.

(Photo: Kevin Frayer/AP.)