Category: The Dish

Her Iowa Achilles stiletto.

The best thing to come out of the NIE is averting a Cheney-style attack that would have created a constitutional crisis and a potential security nightmare. The worst thing is that Iran’s continuing capacity for a nuclear weapon breakout is unaffected. Kissinger isn’t crazy. But here’s another sign of the limits of the West’s traction: Gazprom gets cozier with Tehran. More detail here. Poulos comments here.

‘Tis the season for the shameless pitch:

What is so timely about Sullivan’s book, and why it should be read closely by liberals as well as conservatives, is its embedded firsthand report on the widening ideological cracks in the house that Rove built — a building that Rove used to boast was permanent and impregnable, and that Sullivan now makes look like a tottering fixer-upper," – Jonathan Raban, New York Review Of Books.

"Andrew Sullivan has been more honest and more open-minded than just about anyone else on the right … This is Sullivan at his wonderful best," – David Brooks, New York Times Book Review.

"Sullivan was one of the very few conservatives who repudiated Bush and the Bush movement when Bush was still popular… The Conservative Soul highlights the true philosophical and psychological roots of the Bush movement – its first principles – and reveals just how rotted those fundamentalist roots are. It does this as well as, if not better than, any other book has done," – Glenn Greenwald, Salon.

"I don’t read a lot of books (any actually) that have the words "conservative" or "liberal" on the cover but "The Conservative Soul" is not a fire-breather or a back-slapper or a bunch of anecdotes strung together to mock the other side. [It’s] a fucking book with a capital fucking B. I think a lot of people in America are going to be better for reading it. I know I am," – Matt Stone, co-creator, South Park.

You can buy it as a Christmas gift here and here.

Two key cross-overs hold the architect in contempt of Congress.

A reader writes:

The most telling line in that item about Shaheen’s shot at Obama was this one:

Shaheen said Obama’s candor on the subject would "open the door" to further questions.

It’s not Obama’s drug use that the Clinton people attacked – it’s his candor. Even though they’ve retracted the attack, that choice of emphasis tells you something about their political instincts. When you make mistakes, don’t admit them. If there’s something embarrassing in your past, deny and obfuscate. Just like kindergartengate, this sort of attack could hurt Clinton more than Obama, precisely because of her distinctive weaknesses.

The supposedly fearsome Clinton attack machine may be this primary’s most overhyped commodity. Their attacks are oddly prone to backfire, and it’s all because of who Clinton is. Now imagine that kind of botched attack in the heat of a general election. And if their attack machine is inherently flawed… what are Clinton’s strengths again?

She’s the wife of the last president. Er, that’s it.

Jim Gilchrist’s Huckavote is not popular among his confreres.

"There are two people who have come up with this strategy — one Hillary Clinton and one Mark Penn. Mark wanted to run her, basically, for re-election, and we are seeing what happened," – a top Clinton aide, leaking to Newsday.

Meanwhile, the Clinton camp is in classic passive-aggressive mode. After a surrogate goes after Obama’s previous drug use, we get this:

Kathleen Strand, a spokeswoman for Clinton in New Hampshire, moved quickly to distance the campaign from Shaheen’s comments, saying they "were not authorized or condoned by the campaign in any way." Shaheen did not return phone calls seeking comment, but later apologized in a one-sentence statement issued by the campaign.

More wild smears of Obama here. One word: panic.

And will you please stop strangling the dog?

(Hat tip: Hotline.)

Julian Sanchez on Boumediene vs Bush. Money quote:

Traditionally, courts have used territory as a bright line to determine the status of prisoners: If you were picked up on American soil, you had habeas rights; if not, not. This made a certain amount of sense in traditional war; it makes much less in an ill-defined "War on Terror" that, to hear the administration tell it, makes the whole of the planet a battlefield. Here, hewing to a strict territorial rule has the perverse consequence that the Algerian Six would enjoy more rights, on the government’s theory, if they had illegally infiltrated the United States like the Nazi saboteurs whose fate was considered in Ex parte Quirin (1941). The government’s circular logic here seems better suited to a Monty Python sketch than a court of law: Throw the old lady in the pond, and if she floats, she’s a witch! She might drown, you say? Why are you so worried about what happens to witches?

Michelle Malkin rarely disappoints, does she?