Category: The Dish

Leon says to chill.

"[Y]ou can’t hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. It’s interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what … Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable, years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Rev. Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you’d say ‘Well, I didn’t mean to say it quite like that…

As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say ‘That’s a terrible statement!’ … I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names…" – Mike Huckabee. YouTube here.

Next generation spying takes a step forward.

Where’s the love?

The re-votes seem to be fizzling fast. Which can’t be good news for Clinton.

It’s all so old news isn’t? One of the more appalling aspects of the president’s current cheery, goofy demeanor is that he has clearly sealed off from any psychological absorption that he is and will always be the president who authorized and enforced a new torture regime – torture that, despite all the spin, spread like wildfire after given permission at the top, and involved far, far more than "three" waterboarding sessions. Read Philip Gourevitch’s and Errol Morris’s profile of Sabrina Harman, the woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib, in the current New Yorker. These were no rogue improvisers; they were implementing policy – as the torture and murder and rapes in almost every theater of combat and every branch of the armed services are now a matter of the historical record. An excerpt: 

“You also had stress positions, and you escalated the stress positions,” Davis said. “Hand-cuffs behind their backs, high up, in very uncomfortable positions, or chained down. Then you had the submersion. You put the people in garbage cans, and you’d put ice in it, and water. Or stick them underneath the shower spigot naked. They’d be freezing.” It was a routine, he said: “Open a window while it was, like, forty degrees outside and watch them disappear into themselves . . . before they go into shock.”

The Gestapo and Stalin techniques – excruciating stress positions, imposed and brutal hypothermia, extended sleep deprivation of the kind Menachem Begin once decrobed as the worst of all torments, sexual abuse, beatings – all these were enforced not just at Abu Ghraib but at Camp Cropper, Bagram, Gitmo and many other informal detention centers, and authorized and overseen by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. and as so often they never are held accountable. That’s what low-level grunts are for, isn’t it? Again:

The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy. The authorization of torture and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies of the current Administration; and the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented on the M.I. block in the fall of 2003 were the direct expression of the hostility toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice-President’s office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defense Departments.

These are the guilty men.

One of my always perceptive readers notes:

I have just listened to it for the third time.  Damn, this is impressive.  It is the diametric opposite of the Romney speech.  Romney presented a masterpiece of political triangulation, a speech fabricated by pollsters and political consultants.  Obama spoke from the heart and spoke truly, assuming great political risk for his actions.  He spoke on the assumption that Americans were adults, that they could think for themselves, and that they were prepared to actually think about the dark problems that millions confront every day and yet can’t or won’t confront socially.  I watched the media coverage of this speech on several cable services and news networks.  The media flunks.  It continues to view everything through the optic of manufactured political firestorms. Indeed the media shows how thoroughly it is a part of the problem, not of the solution. 

The story of Obama and his critics truly has become a tale of the sublime and the ridiculous.  Perhaps the thing that most inspires me is that this occurs during Holy Week and Obama has woven the true message of that momentous experience into his speech, in a fashion both subtle and powerful.  (Who could fail to think of that when listening to his statement about "denying" Wright and "denying" the Black population of America?  But most importantly his message was positive, and it focused on redemption.) 

I really don’t know if Obama has the right tools and experience to govern.  But one thing is increasingly clear: he has the message that this country needs to hear.

""I would eat this up like cake," – GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, who crafted the ad in 2002 tying then-Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden, on the Obama-Wright connection. This last week has persuaded me even more profoundly than before that I could never be a Republican.

Hollywood, California, 6.59 am.