Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

"What you say about Mayor Ken Livingstone is only half the truth. It’s pretty ridiculous that he should be suspended for four weeks and by a sub-committee of the unelected Standards Board for England and certainly the system needs reforming; for example, the elected Greater London Assembly could rule on the conduct of the Mayor. But Livingstone’s conduct certainly deserves censure. What he said was boorish and aggressive – in virtually any other walk of life something would’ve been said to him. Imagine an office worker calling a stranger a "concentration camp guard" and his manager not having at least a word with him.  Furthermore, Livingstone seems all in favour of free speech but not, apparently, in favour of journalists being able to do their job without a hail of verbal abuse."

I don’t disagree with any of that. The only thing I objected to is the undemocratic way in which a democratically elected mayor was suspended for saying offensive things. My objection is particularly apposite now. In the West, we cannot berate Muslims for not tolerating blasphemy of their faith if we turn around and then punish free speech which offends our own sensibilities. and the way in which parts of the Jewish community in Britain have embraced this double standard does them no credit. Much of this began with the pernicious notion of "hate crimes," one of the worst concoctions of the p.c. left, designed to police people’s thoughts in exactly the same way that the mullahs do. We are learning that once you create exemptions for free speech, it comes back to bite you. We should repeal these idiotic laws. They are an insult to our freedom.

The ABC News interview: a partial transcript.

I had no idea that Sean Hannity’s fan base has a dating site. I’m not sure whether this particular fan is for real or some kind of parody. But it’s pretty funny nonetheless. Oh, and here’s the one gay guy ballsy enough to post a profile. Does Sean know about this?

It bans all abortion, except when the life of the mother is at stake, a state of affairs Ramesh Ponnuru regards as the "right goal." No incest or rape exceptions. But it may well also ban the morning-after pill. Ron Bailey has more on its implications.

Given Ramesh Ponnuru’s recent meltdown, this email may hit the mark:

"As you’ve no doubt noticed, some denizens of the conservative punditocracy are beginning to flip-out and lose their cool. I can’t speak to the case of Ramesh Ponnuru.  But in the case of Bill Kristol’s crankiness on Fox News Sunday, we seem to be watching somone under a great deal of pressure. The Fukuyama article and the Wm. F. Buckley column have obviously come as body blows. Without questioning the purity of motive or truthfulness of Bush and the neocons, I think it can be safely said that the historical verdict on this great gamble in Iraq is unlikely to be kind. General Odom may come to be seen as the wise man. On top of all this, the Dubai ports case has forced the right to scramble and adopt the soft language of John Kerry (diplomacy and trust are more important than drawing clear lines in the sand) reversing years of careful GOP message making in the space of ten days. It’s enough to make one batty …"

I’m frankly amazed at the lack of coverage on many conservative sites of what is actually happening in Iraq, the blanket silence over the Mora memo, the avoidance of the Buckley piece, and so on. But it is always a good day when ideologues crack. That’s how the light gets in.

One constant feature of the debate over allowing gay couples to settle down and get married has been Stanley Kurtz’s persistent efforts to portray this essentially conservative idea as a leftist Trojan horse for polygamy, the end of the family, and God knows what else. Kurtz is even more slippery than Ramesh Ponnuru on many of these points. Jonathan Rauch calmly dissects them here. There is no plausible evidence that allowing gay couples legal equality has either caused any decline in heterosexual marriage or even correlates with it.

The roster of editors of The New Republic is a relatively small, battered but feisty one. After the bloodbath that accompanied my own departure from the editorship, I’m delighted this transition has gone so amicably. Peter Beinart and Peter Scoblic guided the magazine back to its mission of providing the intellectual heft for liberalism, and they deserve great credit for that. In my judgment, Leon’s back-of-the-book remains indispensable for any thinking person. I don’t share Kevin Drum’s assessment that TNR simply needs to abandon its support of the Iraq war to regain momentum and readership. I think its principled maintenance of a muscular internationalist liberalism is critical to its soul. I was proud to have kept that alive on my watch (even though I’m not quite as interventionist as many of my colleagues), and see Peter Beinart as one of the best advocates for that position in the country. I’m glad he’ll be writing more. Frank Foer is a terrific choice because he has such an uncanny sense of a good story, gets the popular culture, has a deep understanding of the hegemonic right, and, above all, has a sense of humor. Welcome to the club, Frank. Now make some trouble.

They’re reviving a 17th Century recipe for a super-strong whisky in Scotland. Money quote:

"The US Secret Service admitted in 2003 that it had been monitoring the distillery because the difference between distilling a fine whisky and making chemical weapons was ‘just a small tweak’."

The alcohol content is 92 percent. And we have to wait for ten years to drink it? No fair.

Michael Totten is blogging from Kurdistan in Northern Iraq. It’s peaceful, prosperous, and pro-West. New construction is booming. Michael calls it the Utah of the Middle East. Money quote:

"I’m not cherry-picking these photos. I spent almost a week in the city. Every neighborhood I saw, from one end of Suleimaniya to the other, looked either lower middle-class or amazingly wealthy.

Some Kurds are returning home from the diaspora loaded with cash. Others are making money off the surging economy. Iraqi Kurds who remain in the West remit money back to family members who never left.

Real poverty, of the grinding Third World variety, did not appear to exist. If it does exist, it is very well hidden, at least in the cities. (The countryside is still primitive.)"

A useful perspective. Remember that we liberated these people from Saddam and made their security possible. Remember also that for a decade, we provided air-cover to allow their society to be born again. A decade. These things take time. Islam can indeed reconcile itself with the West. Even in the Middle East. Keep hope alive.

I’m glad the NYT gave Antony Lagouranis a chance to explain how abuse and torture of detainees was a function of Bush-Cheney policy and not some improvised gambit on the part of a few rogues on the night shift. But the important point Lagouranis makes – and it’s one not made enough – is that the military command structure insists that superiors take responsibility for abuses on their watch, even if they were unaware of them. What we’ve seen in the Bush administration is a betrayal of that command responsibility, in which underlings take responsibility for the decisions and incompetence of their superiors. We’ve seen a calculated political bid to up-end a fundamental ethical principle in the U.S. military. Meanwhile, a reader writes:

"The backwardness and uselessness of the administration’s torture policy really hit me hard during a recent trip to Cambodia. I visited Cambodia’s most notorious prison, S-21 or Tuol Sleng, in Phnom Penh. Everyone sent to this prison during the worst days of the Khmer Rouge, with the exception of around a dozen people, were eventually murdered in a nearby killing field. There were at least 8,000 victims. Among other horrors that these people endured before finally having their skulls bashed in out in the killing field was a torture technique that looked a lot like water-boarding. When I saw the Tuol Sleng museum’s illustration of this tactic, surrounded by a haunting exhibit of pictures of the inmates, tears filled my eyes. My tears were for the victims and also for my country and its victims. I had never felt so ashamed of being American. I couldn’t believe that my country is engaging in the same tactics the Khmer Rouge used during its darkest days."

In the past, a soldier caught waterboarding a detainee was subject to a court martial. These days, the defense secretary sanctions it.