Category: The Dish

There are some unpretty consequences for some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric being tossed around these days. In an incident eerily reminiscent of the Jim Crow past, a Hispanic youth is all but lynched for trying to kiss a white girl. It has all the elements of racist rage, including the sodomitic rape. Plus ca change …

Michael Totten is blogging his way through the Middle East. When he gets to Israel, he gets culture shock.

Arab countries have a certain feel. They’re masculine, relaxed, worn around the edges, and slightly shady in a Sicilian mobster sort of way. Arabs are wonderfully and disarmingly charming. Israel felt brisk, modern, shiny, and confident. It looked rich, powerful, and explicitly Jewish. I knew I had been away from home a long time when being around Arabs and Muslims felt comfortably normal and Jews seemed exotic.
First impression are just that, though. They tend to be crazily out of whack and subject to almost instant revision …

As often, it’s an interesting, complex analysis from Michael. And, as his photo above suggests, a not entirely bleak one.

Why on earth can we not have 100 percent screening for goods imported into this country? Hong Kong has proven it’s possible. Sure the costs exist and are not negligible; but so too do the economic costs of another 9/11 or worse. Kevin Drum asks the right question here.

A Christian dating hip-hop video. Or something like that.

A member of the "party of death" writes:

My wife and I are personally pro-life but we take a pro-choice position when it comes to public policy (and yes, we vote Democrat). I believe that women should have the complete right to an abortion during the first trimester and after that I favor restrictions. I have yet to come across a Democrat who promotes abortion. If anything, we Democrats stand for neutrality on this issue and want the government to keep out of it. Isn’t this after all a true conservative position?

Er, yes it is. The trouble is: the word ‘conservative’ has been hijacked by religious extremists. I find the attempt of the government to police a woman’s body in the first stages of pregnancy to be a deeply unconservative idea. I find the absolutist stance of those who say a zygote is as morally significant as an infant lacking in the moderation and common sense that has long been the hallmark of conservatism. I abhor abortion as a moral matter and can never condone it. But in the balancing of goods, I’d keep it legal in the first trimester, strongly restrict later abortions, while doing all I can to facilitate care, adoption options and support for pregnant mothers. I’d also aggressively encourage contraception, the morning-after pill, and the institution of marriage as bulwarks against unwanted pregnancy. And all of this makes me part of a "party of death" because I don’t agree with banning all abortion by law?

Ponnuru has his fig-leaf on the partisan point. When he says "party", he can say he doesn’t mean political party. Sure. But somehow only the Democrats appear in the subtitle. And Ponnuru is integral to the GOP machine. Limbaugh and Coulter do the rest. Hey, it sells.

One of those evil pharmaceutical companies is at it again: developing medicines that can improve health and save lives.

I’d put on the following bumper-sticker, noticed by a friend of mine:

"George W. — We will be forever in his debt."

$23 trillion of it. In five years.

Ouch.

A long, detailed and fascinating insight into the Saddam dictatorship in Iraq has just been published in Foreign Affairs magazine. The swift decapitation of his brutal regime gave historians an unusual chance to get primary materials and records and testimony to explore what was going on in his deranged mind as the invasion happened – and much else. The report was commissioned by the U.S. Joint Forces Command. It rests on thousands of interviews and hundreds of pages of documents. It’s an important counter-weight to "Cobra II." There’s much in it that’s revelatory. Among the more important points, it seems to me, are a) Saddam really was hoping that Russia and France would prevent his toppling, because of their business interests; b) he lived in a world of denial and terror where the existence of WMD stockpiles was firmly believed within his own government; c) he created the Saddam Fedayeen, the al Quds Army, and the Baath Party militia to control Kurdish and Shiite unrest, and only later deflected them into the insurgency that is still raging.

But for me, the most important fact is the following:

The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime’s domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam’s older son, Uday, ordered preparations for ‘special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan].’ Preparations for ‘Blessed July,’ a regime-directed wave of ‘martyrdom’ operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

It was only a matter of time before Iraq deployed Islamist terror against the West. Those who sincerely marched against war in London in 2002 and 2003 were unwittingly marching to keep in power a regime planning to bomb and terrrorize them.

(Photo: James Nachtwey for Time.)