Category: The Dish

She hasn’t broken 45 percent once in the poll of polls since the campaign began. As the other Dems have dropped out, she has either trended downward or stayed roughly the same. That’s got to tell you something about the limits of her support.

Given this speculation, an interesting dialogue on tyranny and terror and military action in the Senate in January 2005 between Condi and Barack. Dug up by Jed Lewison. I take Rice’s points, and made some of them myself. But there seems little doubt whose judgment looks sounder in retrospect.
 

Am I alone in wondering whether Benedict XVI will raise the issue publicly? Isn’t this what the papacy is sometimes for – raising moral awareness of the human temptation to evil? Especially when a free society has the capacity to seek the full truth and reform itself? Mark Shea provides a useful guide to the Catholic magisterium’s understanding of torture, the treatment of prisoners, and what that means for Catholics who support "enhanced interrogation techniques." Shea is a much more orthodox Catholic than I am, especially on matters of sexuality, civil marriage, legal abortion, etc. His moral position on torture is, however, the completely orthodox one. On this, you won’t find many traditional Catholics who dissent. Just some Bush Republicans.

"An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)" – New York Times.

An ad for Indiana.

A reader writes:

I was watching the clip of the interview on Russert’s show, and I was surprised with your claim that Obama has a Christian worldview and it is coloring everything that he does. I think this is exactly right. Obama is engaging in a Christian version of politics by being open to talking with enemies, by not belittling his enemies or those who don’t agree with him, by running a positive campaign, by treating people as the flawed-yet-still-created-in-the-image-of-God creatures that we are. But surely you understand that a lot of evangelicals (and others) in America (and elsewhere) wouldn’t recognize this form of behavior as Christian.

Rather, it’s considered being "soft" or "idealistic" or "unrealistic." There is very little difference between being a good American and being a good Christian for a lot of those you call Christianist.  And their conceptions of both of these identities are deeply flawed.  A part of the problematic in understanding Obama correctly is understanding Christianity correctly.  Though I think the Gospel offers a clear prohibition on the use of violence by disciples of Christ and Obama disagrees with this (I am assuming), Obama comes as close to what a Christian president could look like as I have ever seen. In the end, I don’t think a faithful Christian can be president, but Obama may come damn close.

Obama is not a pacifist; he’s a realist, with some uplift added. At least that’s what I glean from his record and statements in foreign policy. If I thought otherwise, if I thought he were Jimmy Carter reborn, I couldn’t support him. But America needs now an ability not to just to manage the world, but to re-inspire its inhabitants again. Only by such a radical re-branding can we begin to get out of the hole we’re in. Only then, I suspect, will the pragmatic opportunities for national and allied advance open up.

Graphic design meets beardom:

"Anyone who thinks al Qaeda is doing well in Iraq needs a reeducation camp in the worst possible way," – Michael Ledeen.

I’m sure he doesn’t mean that literally, but wishing "re-education camps" in their worst form on anyone is not kosher. And, by the way, I think he’s right about al Qaeda in Iraq. Pity it would now be a major achievement to reduce it to the power it had in Iraq when Saddam was in control.

The belated triumph of newspeak.

Some people really need to get a sense of humor.