Category: The Dish

The video. The guy is sooooo uncomfortable when "that subject" comes up.

Arianna joins the throng.

And he made most of it up. Much more convincingly than James Frey. Derb notices the quintessential mark of Tory reactionaryism:

"He had no answers, no hope.

Instead, he offered escape to Simpleham, Peter Simple’s country house with its library, attentive butler, rolling acres and respectful villagers. This was a paradise from which pre-1914 innocence had never been banished."

The present is so much more complicated.

I recall reassuring myself before the invasion that one of the reasons we would win over the Iraqi people was that we were planning to bribe them with massive infrastructure investment and reconstruction. How could they resent that? Once again, I didn’t count on the fathomless incompetence of the Bush administration. If someone had told you before the war that, three years later, electricity would be below pre-war levels and oil production held hostage by Jihadists, would you say that freedom had been on the march? Or just chaos?

Is it me or has the cynicism of this president’s use of the abortion issue now reached a new level? For six years now, this allegedly pro-life president has not addressed the pro-life rally every Roe anniversary. Every time, he’s outside Washington. There can be no scheduling conflict, unless he schedules this date six years in advance. These are his eloquent words:

"You believe as I do that every human life has value, that the strong have a duty to protect the weak, and that the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence apply to everyone, not just to those considered healthy or wanted or convenient. These principles call us to defend the sick and the dying, persons with disabilities and birth defects, and all who are weak and vulnerable, especially unborn children. By changing laws, we can change our culture."

It’s just that the duty to "protect the weak" and "change our culture" doesn’t take precedence over a politically opportune photo-op in Kansas.

His trial, like so much else in occupied Iraq, has become a farce. All the more reason to remind ourselves of what a monster he was. I’m a big believer of exposing the gruesome truth, whether it’s of our own moral failings or the far worse acts of torture and murder once routine under Saddam’s dictatorship, or terrorist acts of barbarism, like the beheading of Nick Berg. Here’s a blog that provides access to video footage of what happened. Not for the squeamish. But useful for the awake.

Some time has now passed since the Vatican’s clear ban on all gay men in seminaries. And here’s one thing that chief theocon, Richard John Neuhaus, and I can agree on. Judging by the public and private responses of most bishops, cardinals and lay people, this Instruction is not really going to be enforced. Some orders, like the Jesuits (thank God they’re still around), are explicitly resisting the order to discriminate against good seminarians on the basis of their sexual orientation. They regard the Instruction as the moral equivalent of an order not to hire black men or Latino men or red-heads. It’s morally preposterous. Given this, many friends – especially in the clergy – have urged me to cool it. They assure me that nothing is really going to happen, that Benedict doesn’t mean it, that even if he does, he’s old and no one in America is going to enforce it, and so on. What they’re really saying is that there are two churches – the one Benedict pretends to govern, and the one that actually exists. Although I’m relieved at the resistance to the Vatican’s bigotry, I find this too glib a response. For one thing, the Church has now a public voice in this, and it is clear: gay men are uniquely psychologically and morally flawed, "objectively disordered," and so on. This public teaching matters. It inflicts enormous pain on many people; it acts as a deterrent to gay teens or men who believe they have a vocation; and it rests on a profound hypocrisy, coming from an institution full of gay men at the very highest echelons. It is also empirically untrue. And any time the Church teaches something untrue, it wounds itself and the faithful. Nevertheless, it’s clear the new teaching has hit something of a wall. It has convinced no one not already in the grip of the new fundamentalism. And it has appalled everyone else. The Vatican, like the old Soviet Union, is pretending to preach things, and lay Catholics are pretending to believe them. This is not a sign of a healthy church.

In his own words. Money quote:

"This is what the Conservative Party has always done: the secret of our enduring success as a political party has been our ability to keep up to date with social progress and the changing aspirations that social progress brings.

Disraeli recognised the need to make the Conservative Party relevant to the emerging middle class in our towns and cities. Churchill recognised the need to offer the post-war generation the dream of a property-owning democracy.

Thatcher saw the need to make Conservatism the aspirational choice for working-class voters trapped by the patronising assumptions of socialism.

So today we need to show how our values and principles are the best way to meet the aspirations of a new generation who demand social justice for all as well as high standards of living for themselves; who care about their quality of life as well as the quantity of money in their pockets."

Vague enough to work? I guess we’ll have to wait for the details. One seems to be fiscal responsibility. Wow. A Conservative party dedicated to balancing the books? What a concept. Oh – and in Canada too.

If you still believe that the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib were a result of a few "bad apples on the night shift", and were not formal military policy, condoned from the highest levels, this online discussion may help. It’s also quite clear that abuse of this kind is going to continue – because the president wants it to. The McCain Amendment does not apply to him, as he has so clearly stated. He is above the law. And intends to stay that way.

An appreciation of George Galloway’s latest excrescence.