Category: The Dish

The view from some Turkish sixteen-year-olds. Yes, this is totally made up.

Dan Drezner is as cogent as ever.

I’ve had fewer emails like this one than I expected, but it’s worth airing the issue:

"For the most part, I agree with the emailer who was iffy on the redesign — though I have to say it’s great to finally read black type on a white background.  Also, I second the previous emailer’s concern about your site now being bought and paid for by Time magazine.  This is the equivalent of those organic, once-independent family farm operations that, once success descends, sell out to big conglomerates out to hedge their bets on the latest big thing.  Hope you keep your independence, Andrew, but this signals a bad, bad trend of MSM reaching into the blogosphere and making it its own."

I beg to differ. I can categorically tell you that the rules for my blogging are what they always have been. No one is pre-editing my posts; no one is looking over my shoulder. Time’s editors have never pressured me to write anything I don’t fully believe in print, and anyone who knows my past knows I’m not exactly renowned for currying favor with my bosses. I think what’s happening here is the opposite of what the reader thinks. Think of it as the blogosphere reaching out to the MSM and helping erase what is, in any case, a somewhat strained distinction. But this much I’ll ask you. If you think I’m going soft, let me know. As if I needed to tell you that.

Enough already.

I wrote too soon. Some conservatives are getting riled up by warrant-free wire-tapping. And they’re bigwigs in the conservative movement. Eventually, the deference breaks …

Hitch, once again, gets it right:

"I believe the President when he says that this will be a very long war, and insofar as a mere civilian may say so, I consider myself enlisted in it. But this consideration in itself makes it imperative that we not take panic or emergency measures in the short term, and then permit them to become institutionalised. I need hardly add that wire-tapping is only one of the many areas in which this holds true.

The better the ostensible justification for an infringement upon domestic liberty, the more suspicious one ought to be of it. We are hardly likely to be told that the government would feel less encumbered if it could dispense with the Bill of Rights. But a power or a right, once relinquished to one administration for one reason, will unfailingly be exploited by successor administrations, for quite other reasons. It is therefore of the first importance that we demarcate, clearly and immediately, the areas in which our government may or may not treat us as potential enemies."

Now the real question: why are there not more conservatives skeptical of a newly intrusive government power? Has it occurred to them that these powers may one day be deployed by a president they don’t trust?

… channeling Elton. Hey, it’s raining.

Max Boot has great fun jousting at straw men today. Well, not entirely straw men. The paranoid far left might indeed think there’s a Nixonian plot to listen in on their phones for purely political reasons. That’s not my point. I don’t see why we can’t monitor al Qaeda this way and follow the law, that’s all. If we need to finesse the law, fine. One other critical point. Oversight helps identify errors and mistakes. It’s a small insurance policy to avoid self-inflicted black eyes. And it’s not as if this administration hasn’t given itself a few. Too little secrecy can hurt us. So can too much.

Every now and again on the Dish, I link to something purely because it cheered me up. It’s gray and pelting with rain in New York City where I just woke up. But the thought of watching William Shatner channel Elton John drives the clouds away.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that good news about epidemics rarely make it into the mainstream media. They like their viruses lethal, their transmission rates soaring, their death rates climbing. That’s why you probably won’t read the following fact in many other places. In the last year, diagnoses of AIDS in San Francisco plummeted another 60 percent from record lows. Deaths dropped to a new low as well. That doesn’t mean that HIV transmission is down – but the signs are good there as well. Nor does it mean that AIDS among the poor and mainly black doesn’t remain a huge problem. But what was once the epicenter of the plague has long since ceased to be so. Two cheers.