Category: The Dish

Matt airs his confusion over the GOP viewing Iraq as not only a success but as a winning issue. Americans aren’t that dumb.

The Dish has been a bit patchy today. I’m still trying to get over this flu. Seems to be lifting a little, happily. I want to apologize to people in Oklahoma City and Madison for being too sick to go give a couple of lectures the last two nights. I hate to cancel. Had no choice. I’ll re-schedule.

Phillip Carter was underwhelmed by the hearings:

Petraeus and Crocker overplayed their hand. They overstated the threat posed by al-Qaeda in Iraq in an effort to justify the mission — a mindset that has generated a deeply flawed strategy. They also overplayed the surge’s success — downplaying or discounting factors that likely did more to create today’s improved security conditions. While their "Anaconda" strategy looks cool on a PowerPoint slide, it confuses the issues of control and influence, putting too much stock in America’s ability to engineer success in Iraq. And, perhaps most tellingly, the two men made the case for perseverance without placing Iraq in the context of vital U.S. national interests, offering only apocalyptic predictions of what would happen if we don’t stay the course.

But that was their carefully prescribed task. I don’t fault them. They’re not responsible for overall strategy. At one point last year, I was worried that Petraeus was being used politically. I was wrong. He’s been a magnificent general, in a near-impossible situation. Ditto Crocker. Along with Patrick Fitzgerald, they strike me as among the most impressive public servants of our time.

In Afghanistan growing wheat is now more cost efficient than growing heroin.

This Monday piece by Trudy Rubin stands up well with some sensible analysis on Iraq:

We don’t know whether a large U.S. troop presence can produce long-awaited political reconciliation or a functional Iraqi government. Iraqis will have ten more months to work on this conundrum before the next U.S. administration takes office. Within that time there will be provincial elections, and Maliki might even be dumped by Iraqi legislators.

We do know – as the Basra affair showed – that Iran is crucial to any Iraq solution. And here is where the next president will have an opportunity to try something different – with Iran.

Distinguishing between what we can affect and what we cannot is the key. Iran has leverage whatever happens, whether we leave or stay and regardless of how we stay. They know it; we know it; at some point, someone will have to talk – and talk big – with power brokers in Tehran. That will be partly what this election will be about; and what it should be about.

Data backing up the notion of a double standard:

"Psychological Science has just published an eye-opening study that found that women who express anger at work were thought of more negatively than men and were assumed to be ‘angry people’ or ‘out of control’. Male colleagues who did the same were typically viewed in a more positive light and were assumed to be upset by circumstances."

A Chicagoan writes:

The man has taken a formerly Irish Catholic Parish that was dying and turned it into the most successful black parish in the archdiocese. Amazingly he has done it in a neighborhood that is not middle class and that has serious social problems. If he had taken a parish in a middle class black neighborhood and made it successful it would have been amazing enough, but he did it in what is best described as ghetto.

He is often wrong and is too quick to blame racism for many social ills, but at heart he is a conservative who preaches self reliance, personal responsibility, and helping your fellow man.

My favorite Pfleger anecdote involves the funeral for Coretta Scott King. He spoke. Jesse Jackson didn’t. Absolutely beautiful.

Here’s a video of an unedited O’Reilly Factor interview with Pfleger a few days ago. See for yourself.

Jack Shafer thinks boomer newspaper journalists getting buyouts is a good thing. On the boomer journalist front, my old boss and friend Mike Kinsley has an affectingly candid essay in the New Yorker about mortality, and his increasingly vivid sense of it. It hadn’t occurred to me to see life-span as a part of status anxiety, but now he puts it that way …

I also realized after reading it that it was one of the most thoroughly Godless pieces of journalism I’d read in a long time. It takes a real non-believer to confront death and not even consider eternity. I admire its stoicism, but I cannot really understand it.

The Guardian gets its hands on a confidential agreement about the future of US forces in Iraq.

Petraeus to Dodd yesterday:

"Every Iraqi is allowed an AK-47 in his house, by law."