Category: The Dish

Tyler Cowen speculates why Japan has so many.

"The race for the Democratic nomination—"race" is hardly the right word, is it?—now feels like a quantum physics problem: How long can a body exist in a state approximating motionlessness without actually stopping?" – John Dickerson, Slate.

The ACLU is running a series of posts on torture this week. Larison,  Greenwald and Joan McCarter have posts up. Here’s Larison:

Should torture prove to be useless, as it typically does, the unnecessary nature of the practice becomes hard to avoid, which is why two different rhetorical tactics are employed. First, you will have the outright denial that torture is taking place (“we don’t torture,” Mr. Bush has said on more than one occasion) and then grudging acknowledgements that “extreme” measures have been used (“enhanced interrogation techniques”), and finally a justification of the actual inflicting of mental and physical duress on detainees. Mr. Bush’s cheerleaders on blogs and radio are quite explicit about this. Blogger Dean Barnett once wrote, “The torture opponents’ entire premise rests on the erroneous notion that one can successfully wage war without cruelty and savagery. I wish they were right. But they’re not.” Challenged by one of his listeners that he supported torture in recent weeks, radio host Michael Medved unflinchingly agreed that he did. What is first wrapped in euphemisms is then openly defended and even celebrated as necessary. Central to this is the denial of the rationality of the enemy, which is tantamount to a denial of their humanity.

What Medved and other torture advocates fail to do, moreover, is confront the fact that what they are defending is illegal and requires amending US law and withdrawal from the Geneva Conventions. Like so many "conservatives" today, they refuse to take full responsibility for their actions.

Gary Hart notes an often-overlooked aspect of Obama’s transformational campaign so far. Yes, there was "bitter-gate." But that was an off-the-record remark amplified by one of his supporters. Yes, there has been Wright. But I don’t see how Obama could have disowned him before he did without wrecking his own reputation for integrity, and violating his own sense of personal loyalty. Against this, you have a rookie national campaigner slaying the biggest brand-name and machine in his own party and building a majority against a veteran like McCain. Anyone who under-estimates his skills is a fool.

Matthew Franck thinks appointing Clinton to SCOTUS would be a gift to Republicans:

Miller misses the most obvious blunder such a move would commit.  Promising the Democratic Party that he would appoint Hillary Clinton to the Supreme Court would put Barack Obama on record as committed to the proposition that the Court is just another political institution like any other.  Its vacancies would be viewed as political chips, to be wagered in a presidential campaign without regard to legal or constitutional categories of thought.

It’s working in reducing flows of illegal immigrants. But the more successful it is, the more the opposition to it grows.

 

Chuck Todd explains.

"If she’s consciously lying, it’s a shockingly cynical move. I don’t think she’s lying. I think she’s so convinced of her own morality and historical importance that she can whip herself into a moralistic fervor to support nearly any position that might benefit her, however crass and sleazy. It’s not just that she’s convinced herself it’s okay to try to steal the nomination, she has also appropriated the most sacred legacies of liberalism for her effort to do so. She is proving herself temperamentally unfit for the presidency," – Jon Chait.

Seriously, guys:

Desperate to get attention for her cause to seat Florida and Michigan delegates, Hillary Clinton compared the plight of Zimbabweans in their recent fraudulent election to the uncounted votes of Michigan and Florida voters saying it is wrong when “people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.”

“We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe," Clinton explained. "Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people,” Clinton told the crowd of senior citizens at a retirement community in south Florida.

Can someone get her help?

A reader writes:

I’m a longtime daily reader who hasn’t written you much, if ever, but I wanted to make two quick points about this post:

Yes, there was definitely a sharper partisan message when he talked about McCain in Iowa yesterday.  And yes, that’s exactly the type of thing he’s promised to avoid, thus attracting a lot of independents such as yourself to his candidacy. But for those of us who are Democrats, who held their noses and voted for Kerry in 2004, you have to realize how unbelievably refreshing it is to hear the Democratic candidate speak the way he did last night.  You’ve touched on it before – he doesn’t respond to attacks from a defensive position, he punches right back. He believes that his arguments are the better arguments, not that his position can be framed in a way that will appease 51% of the electorate.

And secondly, a lot of Obama’s supporters did support Bill and Hillary in the 1990s (sorry, Andrew, but this is the Democratic party). And while we’ve been appalled and ashamed over the last year and a half as the Clintons’ true character (or lack thereof) revealed itself in so many ways, it’s never felt completely right to view the Clintons as the enemy (not that it stopped us). To be finally able to put the intra-party squabbling behind us and focus our attention on a candidate that supports the Iraq War, supported the Military Commissions Act, favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, and is beholden to a chorus of socially backward special interests just by virtue of his party affiliation – it’s refreshing like you wouldn’t believe.