Category: The Dish

I did not know this about Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Somali culture began to demand that Ayaan too become a submissive woman who scrubbed away her own personality and sexuality. When she was five years old, she was made “pure” by having her genitals hacked out with a knife. It was a simple process. Her grandmother and two of her friends pinned her down, pulled her legs apart, and knifed away her clitoris and labia. She remembers the sound even now – "like a butcher, snipping the fat off a piece of meat." The bleeding wound was sewn up, leaving a thick tissue of scarred flesh to form as her fleshy chastity belt. She could not walk for two weeks.

Ayaan soon realised that in a culture so patriarchal it could not tolerate the existence of an unmaimed vagina, "I could never become an adult. I would always be a minor, my decisions made for me. But I wanted to become an individual, with a life of my own."

When you read Johann Hari’s poignant, sensitive account of this remarkable woman’s life, you understand more profoundly why she can say both this:

"I see no difference between Islam and Islamism. Islam is defined as submission to the will of Allah, as it is described in the Koran. Islamism is just Islam in its most pure form. Sayyid Qutb [the thinker who inspired al Qaeda] didn’t invent anything, he just quoted the sayings of Mohammed."

And this:

"It’s wrong to treat Muslims as if they will never find their John Stuart Mill. Christianity and Judaism show people can be very dogmatic and then open up. There is a minority [within Islam] like [reformists] Irshad Manji and Tawfiq Hamid who want to remain in the faith and reform it… Can you be a Muslim and respect the separation of church and state? I hope a large enough number of Muslims will agree you can, and they will find a way to keep the spiritual elements that comfort them and live in a secular society."

Between those two quotes lies our future.

In one of those bloggy free associations, a reader tips me off to David Pearson’s work. The Great Loves series is particularly striking.

I haven’t actually, you know, endorsed anyone for either party’s nomination. I like Obama, Paul and McCain, as any reader could tell you. But that’s it … for now. I think a blogger should make up his or her mind when it matters, so I hope to make a clear pick for both sides before Christmas, and I’ll make a pick for president next fall. But I haven’t yet.

Well, winter is coming …

A reader writes:

You wrote:

Imagine an Obama-McCain race: adult, graceful, necessary, and good for us.

At first glance, this seems instinctively correct. But I fear that if it is indeed Obama vs McCain, you’ll come to rue these words someday, especially if McCain were to swallow his pride and dignity (something he’s done freely and often during the past seven years) and hire Rovian types, who would gladly play the Obama-Osama/Isn’t-he-a-Muslim? card. I could easily see McCain – close to reaching his dream of the White House, and therefore so anxious were he to slip in the polls to the young whippersnapper Obama (a likely scenario) – becoming desperate and start slinging the mud. He has sold pieces of his soul time and again since 2000 – why wouldn’t he sell what’s left of it in exchange for the ultimate victory?

It doesn’t matter whom the GOP nominee will be, Andrew: There will be nothing adult, graceful, necessary, or good for us about his campaign.

You can already see the hot-button issues forming: fear of immigrants; endorsing torture and destruction of the Constitution to protect us from those A-rabs; advocating "victory" in Iraq and sabre-rattling about Iran; scaring everyone to death about "socialized medicine"; and implying that the Democrat(ic) nominee is a closet Muslim and Osama cousin (Barack), lezbo castrata (Hillary), or a closet queer ("Breck Girl" Edwards).

You’ve got half of your equation right: Obama would run an adult, graceful, and necessary campaign that would be both "good for us" and in marked contrast to the debased mudfest the GOP would have in store. And we would learn an awful lot about the American people by whom we’d choose, and what ultimately motivates us more: Hope and Inclusion, or Fear and Division. The biggest reason to support Obama is the stark and utterly refreshing contrast he will provide to the GOP nominee.

But don’t bet your mortage, or your health benefits, on the outcome.

I’m late to this. Here’s Joe’s blog-post correcting an error in his Time column. Here’s Glenn’s long, impassioned response. I remember reading Joe’s column and being a little surprised by this:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans.

This was the gut of the column and it was wrong. We all make mistakes and the intricacies of the FISA law are mind-numbing. I think Joe’s correction is fine, although I do think the online version of the column needs to have a correction attached pronto. But my main issue is with the reflexive fear centrist Democrats have in the face of shameless demagogues like Limbaugh. This is Clintonism writ large. The argument for judicial safeguards on wire-tapping is popular and important. It’s a vital and simple precaution against abuse of government power. Until Democrats and traditional Republicans stop being craven in the face of the far right’s bluster – until they get angry at the idiocy and un-American authoritarianism of the Hannity-Limbaugh-Giuliani right, they will lose, and deserve to lose.

Beneath this war between new and old media, there is a deeper and more important battle: to regain our collective nerve against the bullies of the authoritarian far right. The difference between my position and Joe’s is minuscule on this war, and, unlike Glenn, I admire and like Joe Klein as a journalist and friend. But we need more Greenwaldism and less Clintonism in the fight for American freedom. Bullies see a defensive crouch as an invitation for more bullying. It is time to fight back.

A button! A website.

Shaun Mullen realizes that we’re in Iraq for ever. And no one in the Bush administration ever contemplated anything else.

A response to Ezra Klein’s critique of Obama’s healthcare plan.