Category: The Dish

Clinton deploys her smartest ad yet. It really advertizes her inner nerd and workaholic as virtues. In many ways, I think Clinton should have emphasized her frumpy, unglamorous, but diligent side more. She could appeal in a way that Queen Elizabeth II has eventually appealed: a familiar, hard-working, uninspiring grandma who knows what she’s doing and will always be cautious but smart. Alas, Clinton’s boomer narcissism and fathomless self-pity mess up the picture. But as a last minute gambit, it’s smart:

By the way, I’m a little disturbed by how eerily close this image is to the one I posted last night. Yes, it’s boogey-man time. But Clinton wants to let you know she’ll protect you.

A blood-fueled forearm display, with bluetooth.

Daryl Cagle nails it:

John J Miller admirably concedes that, in fact, Buckley had been a skeptic:

It was four years ago that Mr. Cheney first observed that there was a real fear that each fallen terrorist leads to the materialization of another terrorist. What can a “surge,” of the kind we are now relying upon, do to cope with endemic disease?

It’s amazing how today’s right don’t seem to realize that Buckley was, you know, a conservative. Once you remove the WMD issue and the threat to Western security, there is no conservative defense of the Iraq war, let alone a conservative defense of a permanent Iraq "nation"-building occupation. In fact, it is very hard to think of any foreign policy objective that is less conservative than permanently occupying, and re-making, a foreign country, whose subtleties we know nothing about, whose destiny we have no business directing, and whose people resent as a religious imperative the presence of any non-Muslims in their territory. To engage in this task for five years, propose it for fifty, and defend it by the kind of rhetoric used in the Second Inaugural is one of the biggest assaults on conservative principles in a very long while. It takes a Bush.

There’s a reason NRO is now citing Angeline Jolie and not William F Buckley on this matter.

Fallows on Ignatius on Sageman. The great unanswered question of the last six and a half years is: why haven’t we been attacked again? There are logically two – not necessarily exclusive – possibilities: our defense has been getting much better; their offense was over-rated. I suspect that technology, good police work, and plenty of heroic stories that neither you nor I know about have made a difference. But seven years is a long time. And Bush is not exactly Mr Competence, is he?

Have we misread the world – and over-estimated the threat – even more profoundly than we realize? That is the question.

Maybe I should have been explicit. I wrote:

Homosexual sodomy was always subjected to more scrutiny and disparagement than heterosexual sodomy, even when sodomy became – as it did in the 1960s with the advent of the pill – the overwhelming sexual practice of the straight.

By sodomy, I mean the technical term of non-procreative intercourse. That includes the use of condoms, the pill, oral sex and butt-fuckery. That was what the church meant when it invented the entire category. We are all sodomites now. I wrote a review essay in 2003 for The New Republic with that very title on the history of sodomy. Check it out.

Many of you objected to my pooh-poohing of Congressional investigations into steroid use. You pointed to articles like this one about the unseemly and alarming death rate of pro-wrestlers, caused, almost certainly, by rampant steroid abuse:

USA TODAY’s examination of medical documents, autopsies and police reports, along with interviews with family members and news accounts, shows that at least 65 wrestlers died in that time, 25 from heart attacks or other coronary problems — an extraordinarily high rate for people that young, medical officials say. Many had enlarged hearts.

That’s awful, but why should it be any business of the government? These are grown men, aware of the risks, and taking them, and dying young. It’s their choice, their lives, their bodies. Leave them alone.

Feel the hate.

So many sympathetic straights just don’t know the kind of inequality gays live with all the time. What does that say about the effectiveness of the leading gay rights groups?

Ron Bailey goes there. Matt dissents. Jonah Lehrer thinks it depends on what you mean by happy. But children are definitely not green:

Your net carbon impact depends far more on the number of children you will have than any other variable; remember good environmentalism uses a zero rate of discount. So people with no biological children should be allowed to fly a lot and people with lots of biological children should not get to fly so much at all.