Category: The Dish

An evangelical vents:

How did we get to the point where such a question needs to be asked of an attorney general? Who allowed our country to succumb to such fear and moral cowardice that we parse the meaning and definition of "torture?"

I blame myself, and implicate my fellow Christians. We have remained silent and treated an issue once considered unthinkable–the acceptability of torture–like a concept worthy of honest debate. But there is no room for debate: torture is immoral and should be clearly and forcefully denounced. We continue to shame ourselves and our Creator by refusing to speak out against such outrages to human dignity.

The silence of many (but not all) Christians these past few years is just one of the prices of being coopted by political power. But many have spoken out. Their witness is necessary when the government practices something that is, by any Christian calculus, inherently and inescapably not just wrong – but evil.

"Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud," – Deroy Murdock, National Review.

Have you noticed that the pro-torture right has gone from saying that torture is abhorrent to saying that torture isn’t occurring to saying that torture is not torture to now saying that torture is "something of which every American should be proud". And why not indeed? The Cheney logic is impregnable: the president is not bound by the law or the Geneva Conventions; torture reveals information that allows the government to seize individuals who might at some point commit terror attacks; the president’s job is to prevent terror attacks. Torture is thereby a good. Alas, the American constitution clearly does not say that the president is above the law; the Geneva Conventions do apply to all captives in wartime and the bar on mistreatment far less than torture is clear; the only source we have for the fact that these terror suspects were terrorists is the government that uses torture against them; torture itself has no way of determining what is true or what is false and was designed in the first place to produce false confessions. And the president’s first job is to uphold the Constitution.

Then, of course, there is the question of morality. But if you follow Murdock’s reasoning that torture saves lives, and your moral rubric is entirely utilitarian, then torture itself is obviously an active moral good. I have no idea why more "conservatives" don’t aggressively propose expanding it. And here’s a prediction: after the next terror attack, they will.

He has an appeal Clinton will never match:

Political organizing for Democrats in red states like Nebraska can often feel a bit like leading AA meetings. But that hasn’t deterred more than 300 Nebraskans from forming a dozen groups for Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and they aren’t the only ones. On Monday, the Obama campaign announced that over 300 Iowa and New Hampshire Republicans had decided to cross party lines to support Obama. At Obama events in Oklahoma, Kentucky, Virginia and Georgia, a good 20% of audiences routinely raise their hands when emcees ask for Republicans in the crowd. A "Republicans for Obama" website has 11 state chapters with 146 members. An August University of Iowa even found Obama running third in the state among Republican candidates, behind Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani but ahead of both Fred Thompson and John McCain. And a national Gallup poll this month also found that nearly as many Republicans like Obama — 39% — than the 43% that dislike him, compared with the 78% of Republicans who held an unfavorable opinion of Hillary Clinton.

A stunning online video from NASA.

It’s a fair piece, if obviously tilted toward Romney and against Obama. This much is very clear, though, and I’ve been struck by it myself. I can’t find anyone who is Obama’s peer who dislikes him. In fact, the legions of Republicans and conservatives who positively love the guy is almost unnerving. Money quote:

In my previous professional life, I had reason to be in contact with dozens of Barack Obama’s classmates at Harvard Law School. When he entered the presidential race, I dusted off my Rolodex and began making some calls to get the off-the-record skinny on the Democrats’ potential savior. The results surprised me. Regardless of his classmates’ politics, they all said pretty much the same thing. They adored him. The only thing that varied was the intensity with which they adored him. Some spoke like they were eager to bear his children. And those were the guys. Others merely professed a profound fondness and respect for their former classmate.

Even more interesting was what wasn’t said. In dozens of conversations, not a single person said anything negative about him, and some were hardly the senator’s political fellow travelers. Also noteworthy is that virtually everyone seemed to know Obama. Usually people who have such a high profile on law school campuses have their detractors. Obama apparently didn’t.

But Dean thinks Obama’s campaigning has fallen flat, and compares him unfavorably to Romney. For my part, I hear only good things about Romney’s character, and I don’t disbelieve them. There’s something extremely nice about Romney – and in this, he is not atypical of many Mormons I have come across. But the idea that Romney has been planning what he wants to say in this race for years is silly.

Romney’s politics have been completely retooled these past five years to cater to the Christianist base. He has changed political identity far more completely than Obama. Romney has also failed in any real way to generate donor enthusiasm, certainly compared with Obama, and has nothing like the online support. He has largely bought his own lead in Iowa and new Hampshire through personal funding of ad buys. His campaign performances have been lack-luster, and his occasional utterances moronic. The idea that an intelligent response to the detainee issue is to "double Gitmo" is silly. Romney’s description of his foreign policy is a third-grader’s, compared with Obama. A man who has no grasp of the different challenges of Wahhabist terror and Shiite Tehran is still in need of training. He panders so blatantly and wildly he sometimes says things that are worthy of a total fool. But like Obama, he is not indecent and not nasty. Which is to say he is much better than Giuliani, even though my views on the social issues are closer to Giuliani than to Romney (as of November 2007).

I wouldn’t be terrified for the future of the Constitution if he became president. I would if Rudy were on control.

A striking survey from Europe:

A study of more than 5,000 youngsters in Switzerland has found those who smoked marijuana do as well or better in some areas as those who don’t, researchers said Monday.

But the same was not true for those who used both tobacco and marijuana, who tended to be heavier users of the drug, said the report from Dr. J.C. Suris and colleagues at the University of Lausanne.

The study did not confirm the hypothesis that those who abstained from marijuana and tobacco functioned better overall, the authors said.

In fact, those who used only marijuana were "more socially driven … significantly more likely to practice sports and they have a better relationship with their peers" than abstainers, it said.

I should add I don’t support the legal use of marijuana by teenagers. I’d be happy to keep it illegal for the under-age, as with cigarettes. But it does not surprise me that moderate use of the drug has no correlation with personal, social or academic failure.

Derb spots the big difference: there is none. Which is why today’s incarnation of National Review is so often unrecognizable from the spirit and political philosophy that founded it.

The ACLU discovers another piece of withheld evidence of possible war crimes by members of the Bush-Cheney administration. We don’t know what’s in it yet, and a judge will begin adjudicating whether we will be able to find out one day. The memo was penned by Steven Bradbury. Money quote from Spencer Ackerman:

Of course, the sudden appearance of the 2005 Bradbury-supervised OLC memos raises the possibility that the administration is still hiding other torture memos. "We’ve always had that suspicion," ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer says, explaining that the ACLU knows of "dozens" of torture documents yet to be released to the ACLU FOIA. Those, he says, include photos of prisoners "not from Abu Ghraib" subjected to brutal interrogations, as well as documents relevant to the CIA inspector-general inquiry into prisoner abuse by the CIA at Iraq and Afghanistan. (That inquiry was one of several that led General Mike Hayden, director of the CIA, to open an inquiry on the inspector general.)

So is the government acting in good faith? "I don’t know. I just don’t know," Jaffer says.

Cheney? Oh yes, we do. Oh yes, we do.

A great idea. The man is a war criminal, and has done more to undermine our Constitutional balance than any man since Richard Nixon. Secretive, incompetent, belligerent, contemptuous of the rule of law, there is barely a bad decision this president has made that doesn’t have Cheney’s fingerprints on it. Of course, the Democrats are scared of taking on this man. But they are, by and large, a bunch of empty suits (and one botoxed empty pant-suit). I’m delighted the Congress is finally tackling the issue of the vice-president’s attack on the constitution. If done right, it could help air the fundamental indecency that Cheney represents. But, of course, it won’t be done right. Which is why I remain someone who, abandoned by the current Republicans, still can’t even think of identifying as a Democrat.