Category: The Dish

A rant against "pedagogical Taylorism."

Rod Dreher welcomes me to what he once called "crunchy condom."

Mark Blumenthal believes the Quinnipiac poll in Pennsylvania has an excellent record. Some analysis of the internals here. One nugget:

Hillary Clinton’s unfavorable rating among African Americans (34%) is now greater than Obama’s unfavorable rating among non-college educated whites (26%).

Much tougher:

"The original ad asked, Who would you prefer answering the call — someone with strength and experience, or someone who’s untested?"

Well, we know the ad McCain will run now, don’t we?

Same old, same old.

"In a move that’s sure to be seen as controversial, Hillary has contacted the NCAA Board of Directors to argue that Memphis is actually better qualified to be National Champion.

Ms. Clinton stated that Memphis, while losing the game, had actually shown more ability to act like a National Champion on Day One. She argued that Memphis had passed every test during the game, including scoring more points than Kansas for 38 minutes. For 38 minutes they had shown the experience necessary to be National Champion. ‘Just because some team comes along in the last minute and scores more points than the other guy doesn’t mean they’re necessarily able to be National Champion on Day One,’" – DPolitico.

Even Fox News thinks the "intelligent design" movie sucks.

The latest Obama fundraising gambit online.

Josh Marshall comments on the GOP trying to distance McCain from his 100 years comment:

Here’s why Republicans are scared to death of this. No one wants to be in Iraq 100 years from now, even if McCain stipulates to the fantasy that Iraqis will be happy having us occupy their country forever and that the place will become like Finland. And none of our soldiers will ever get killed there and it won’t cost any money. If that’s the explanation for why we shouldn’t be concerned that he’s happy to stay in Iraq for a century, that just tells people that McCain is living in a fantasy world.

Dave Wiegel earlier this week:

The wiggle room comes when McCain says he’s okay with the 100 years "as long as our soldiers are not being wounded or maimed or killed." And that’s where McCain’s defenders have chosen to stand and fight. See, McCain doesn’t want to fight a hot war for 100 years. He wants to have a base there until the Middle East stops producing threats to the U.S. To say otherwise is "an attack on McCain’s character," as Michael Goldfarb puts it in that Weekly Standard link.

That’s a dodge, though. It assumes that 1) there is nothing controversial about building permanent bases in Iraq, 2) that maintaining those bases would be completely positive effects on the region, and that 3) there’s nothing wrong with a potential president telling the world we’ll be in Iraq forever. Not much room for realpolitik there, eh? It’s unfair to distort what McCain says, but it’s wrong to portray this as harmless straight talk.

My own view is that McCain’s comment, in its most benign formulation, misses the key element here: Islam. One reader helpfully pointed out that occupied Japan also had a fiercely proud populace revolted by foreign troops. Sure: but it had been defeated as a unitary state and its Emperor (which we wisely retained) gave the occcupiers sanction. No such unitary state exists in Iraq; and Islam forbids the rule of infidels in its own heartlands – and Iraq has central religious importance for its various shrines and religious centers in the Muslim mind. Secularism has been in decline for a couple of decades. There is no way an Arab Muslim country will tolerate Western troops permanently based on their land – without constant war and threat of war. To believe otherwise is to engage in a "holiday from reality." We’ve done enough of that.

The future of a permanently occupied Iraq is less likely to be Japan than the West Bank. And the deeper we are stuck there, the more our predicament will become the awful, morally corrosive, soul-sapping experience of the occupying Israelis.