Category: The Dish

An Oscar for "Taxi To The Dark Side." I wrote about it here. Alex Gibney talks about the Bush administration’s "fog of ambiguity" here. Hey: euphemism, legal flim-flam, ambiguity. When you want to torture someone, there are many ways to cover it up.

Clinton’s latest gambit. Obama is a cyborg sent from the future to destroy us. Oh and he used to smoke crack.

Grooming Chelsea. Why can’t political leaders keep their kids out of it?

Another Clintonite defection.

Encouraging signs from Pakistan?

"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told … It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster," – T.E. Lawrence, Sunday Times (London), August 2, 1920.

The British were trapped in Iraq for four more decades, attempting to create some kind of rational polity, sectarian peace and national unity in a part of the world where Arab pathologies were compounded by fathomless Muslim fanaticism. They failed, believe it or not. They failed despite the presence, at its peak, of the equivalent of almost ten times the troop level of the current, now five-year, U.S. occupation. John McCain is telling us that with a tiny fraction of the troop levels of the British per capita, and with lucrative oil profits available to the various warring parties to finance a war for ever, an independent, unified, non-despotic, pro-Western Iraq is within reach. If that is true, we are indeed on the verge of the biggest holiday from history imaginable.

(Photo: the Brits conquering Baghdad – easily – in 1917. They couldn’t get out for another forty years.)

My friend stuck to this story when no one else was really paying attention. Now Sixty Minutes moves the ball forward. And the program was simply blocked from being shown in northern Alabama.

An interesting – and ugly – incident in the senator’s past, brilliantly reconstructed by Glenn Thrush:

In 1975, a 27-year-old Hillary Rodham, acting as a court-appointed attorney, attacked the credibility of a 12-year-old girl in mounting an aggressive defense for an indigent client accused of rape in Arkansas – using her child development background to help the defendant… Rodham, records show, questioned the sixth grader’s honesty and claimed she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl often fantasized and sought out "older men" like Taylor, according to a July 1975 affidavit signed "Hillary D. Rodham" in compact cursive.

Of course, she subsequently accused the victims of her own husband’s sexual harassment (and alleged rape, in one instance) of making it up as well. But, hey, the price you pay for being a lawyer, a pol, and a feminist, eh?

Obama in a funny-looking outfit. Yeah, he has an African heritage. Maybe we should just cut out the middle man and give Clinton Kristof’s piece from this Saturday (video here):

Mr. Obama’s late grandfather is said to have been the first person in the area to wear Western clothes rather than just a loincloth. For a time he converted to Christianity and adopted the family name Johnson.

Later he converted to Islam, taking four wives. Senator Obama’s father, who apparently converted to Catholicism while attending a Catholic school, was also polygamous in keeping with local custom, taking an informal Kenyan wife who preceded Mr. Obama’s mother but remained a consort, according to accounts by local people and the senator himself.

What’s Sid Blumenthal waiting for?

Who is the cooler, calmer candidate: Obama or McCain?