Category: The Dish

Tallahassee, Florida, dusk.

A reader writes:

Many have noted the irony that a Christian administration would torture, but your recent e-mail also shows the practical problem for Christian conservatives here.

As good non-relativists, Christians ought to believe in universal standards, moral codes that apply to everyone. In some fashion that’s what the Geneva Conventions and other international agreements are meant to provide. But an unshakable article of conservative faith is that the United Nations and most other international compacts are inherently evil. So we come to a point where all that matters is American laws, American goals – and American power.

This really cannot stand. We will reach a point where we have infinite power, but zero influence. The nations we desperately need to change and win over will come to think that we get our authority solely from the barrel of a gun – or the damp gauze of a waterboarder. We will claim that we believe in universal, unalienable rights, but will refuse to hold ourselves to any meaningful universal standards. No one will take anything we say seriously, except our threats of war.

I recall Oakeshott’s response to a question about the power of the U.S. president. ‘The president has no power," Oakeshott explained. "A blackmailer has power. The president has authority." Under this president, I fear, we are beginning to appreciate that distinction more profoundly.

All we can do apart from searching for them is pray for them. But Rude Pundit has some thoughts about what we’ll say if we discover that they have been tortured. Money quote:

What will our government do? What could it do? Could it condemn the actions as not abiding by the Geneva Conventions? Could it call the actions "torture"? Could it demand accountability? Could it demand that the soldiers be treated as POWs? Could it simply say, "Well, we don’t do that shit … anymore"?

No it couldn’t. Pray for the safe rescue of the soldiers – and for the president who abandoned Geneva.

Spencer Ackerman asks:

Take all the shelving out of a typical filing cabinet. (My own office cabinet happens to be slightly smaller than the [4 feet high, 4 feet long and 20 inches wide] cell described here.) Now lock yourself in it for two days. You may notice you can neither stand up straight nor lie down, and crouching gets really uncomfortable extremely fast. Remember that as an Iraqi detainee, the Geneva Conventions apply to you. Now ask yourself: Why would Formica consider such treatment "reasonable" for two days? And if someone put an American soldier in such conditions for two days – or authorized doing so – what should happen to that person?

I haven’t discussed the Formica Report because, even by the standards of the several previous reports, this one was such an exercize in transparent denial and avoidance it didn’t merit discussion. But General Formica did what Rumsfeld wanted: no one was held responsible even for the abuses Formica did concede. That’s the Bush principle. Torture, pretend to investigate, and exculpate. Rinse the blood off your hands and repeat.

"Frag Congressman Murtha? Why not? He’s one of the enemy now. People who understand Coulter can see these things clearly," – a letter-writer to WorldNetDaily.

"I think South Dakota is going to be a huge, probably hard education for what I would call the hard-line pro-life forces … A lot of people are going to be surprised at what they do when they have to go into that polling place, where no one’s watching. How many of them are pro-life themselves but just won’t pull the lever in favor of the law?" – Neil Fulton, a South Dakota lawyer who describes himself as a pro-life practicing Catholic, in the New Yorker.

The magazine has a big piece on South Dakota’s looming ballot decision on banning all abortions, including those incurred by rape and incest. Author Cynthia Gorney’s Q and A on the piece can be read here.

Here’s an interesting and informative take on Zarqawi’s presumed successor in al Qaeda in Iraq. It seems al Masri is more closely connected with international al Qaeda than his renegade predecessor – which offers both dire potential and some opportunity for the West.

The backlash against the blogosphere is now in full swing. Here’s the Weekly Standard take on Yearly Kos; and here’s TNR on same. Christine Rosen’s take-down of Glenn Reynolds can be found here. Money quote:

Reynolds’s blog consists largely of links to news or opinion articles and other blogs followed by comments consisting of such profound observations as "Heh," or "Read the whole thing," or "Indeed." (These are recurring tropes whose centrality can’t be exaggerated.) What Reynolds lacks in analysis, he makes up for in abundance of content. On any given day, he’ll provide his readers nearly 20 entries–or, if you can stomach it, more.

Indeed. Jason Blair Leopold gets his comeuppance – rightly – in the Washington Post here. Money quote:

"These days it is about the reporter, not the story; the actor, not the play; the athlete, not the game. Leopold is a product of a narcissistic culture that has not stopped at journalism’s door, a culture facilitated and expanded by the Internet."

Ouch. Some of this strikes me as overkill. The blogosphere has unleashed amazing new potential for great commentary, analysis and journalism. It has also unleashed real nastiness, group-think, and glibness. It is both much shallower and more temporal than print-journalism, but also, because of its capacity to follow up stories and, most importantly, to hyperlink to vast databases, much deeper. The MSM is beginning to understand the potential of this new medium and coopt it. Nothing wrong with that. We are at the dawn of this medium. And it hasn’t begun to teach us its ultimate potential yet. Sometimes we have to make mistakes and pursue blind alleys to figure it out.

(Update: a Kossack objects to Ryan Lizza’s account of a panel discussion here.)

Cutler, Maine, 4 pm.

The Washington Post found a "sensitive" cable from the U.S. ambassador’s office in Baghdad, issued just after the president’s visit last week. It is signed "Khalilzad" (all such cables routinely are) – but was buried in the B-section. It portrays a society in sectarian and security meltdown – with growing Islamist influences. Iraqi employees at the embassy bear witness to theocratic crackdowns worse than exist in neighboring Iran in some areas. In 115 degree heat, much of Baghdad gets one hour of electricity for every four hours without it. I don’t think this can be attributed to MSM bias. It’s the U.S. embassy’s own private assessment. Download the PDF file here and read it.