Category: The Dish

Domestically, John Hawkins says it’s a third term for Bush:

Would Huckabee be a strong, socially conservative candidate for the GOP in 2008 with an excellent chance of beating Hillary? Yes, he would. In the last 9 elections — at a minimum — the more likable candidate has won and Huckabee beats Hillary hands down in that category. Also, the fact that he’s a governor, not a Washington insider, would also be a huge advantage. If you ask me who is more electable in a general election, Huckabee, Romney, or Rudy, I’d take Huckabee over either of them by a good margin. Given that the war on terror and the Supreme Court will be hanging in the balance, electability is no small thing.

However, the downside of Huckabee is that he’s essentially George Bush with charisma when it comes to domestic issues. He is not a small government guy or a fiscal conservative, he doesn’t seem to be a movement conservative, and he’s not someone who can be trusted to be tough on illegal immigration.

On foreign policy, we’re talking Bush in 1999.

Well, in this case, that might be optimistic. More proof that the Japanese are among the weirdest people on the planet: a series of animated shorts for some baby-dolls. You can view the rest here. If I were you, I wouldn’t click on the one whose head looks like brown soft-serve ice-cream. That’s not the analogy they had in mind. This one is just creepy – babies body-building until their lats pop.

RedState defends its decision to bar future posters from supporting Ron Paul:

Erickson thinks that they’re a human political cocktail of Code Pink activists and Neo Nazis, and he doesn’t expect them to vote for anyone other than Paul.

All thinks that a lot of them are those who  buy into Paul’s message of limited government and fiscal responsibility.

I don’t think I qualify as a Neo-Nazi or a Code Pink activist. Full Wired story here. But here’s a simple message to Ron Paul supporters. You’re welcome here. The Dish believes in expanding the range of debate among conservatives, not crushing it. And any cursory look at the degenerate state of American conservatism would not lead you to think your problem is too much diversity of opinion.

Niche-blogging at its best: a blog devoted to isolating and examining every time a candidate says s/he’s "the only one" to do or have done something. Most of the quotes are bullshit, of course. But this is politics.

Let the speculation begin. I think Gore realizes that Obama is the only candidate who can break out of the brutal, polarizing, calculating, post-Vietnam syndrome and actually talk to all the country in clear ways about what practically we need to do at home and in the world. Gore would instantly erase the inexperience question over Obama; Obama would instantly erase the stylistic drawbacks of the Gore persona. The three big issues for me in this election are the war, the Constitution, and the environment. A Gore-Obama combo would be extremely hard to beat if those are your concerns.

Gore, moreover, knows what the Clintons would take us back to perhaps better than anyone else. He knows the paranoia of their operation, the Cheney-like secrecy they crave, the pathologies within our political culture they would instantly reignite, the danger that they will breathe new life into a hopefully dying Christianist movement. But the Clinton machine is in full throttle. If Gore wants to help provide an alternative, he needs to intervene before Iowa. He needs to endorse Obama. For the sake of his country.

The Economist looks on the bright side of oil price increases:

Adjusted for inflation, the $100 barrel would not exceed the record set in 1980. Also, big economies today are generally better insulated from oil-price fluctuations. Developed countries use half as much oil per real dollar of GDP as in the mid-1970s, thanks to improved energy efficiency. This year the price of oil has increased by about 70% since January without stunting economic growth in America.

Not only could the world withstand higher prices, some argue that further increases would be beneficial. A growing number of economists suggest that pricier oil is healthy, particularly for the environment. But the rise must be gradual and predictable so that economies can adjust. Large and sudden increases are the ones that tend to create recessions.

Meanwhile, some Germans are freaking out.

Tuscany, Italy, 2.30 pm.

A reader writes:

Your reader wrote: "What if 9/11 had been a nuclear attack?"

‘What if,’ indeed. On the first page of his excellent and disturbing book, "Nuclear Terrorism – The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe" – Graham Allison, a former deputy secretary of defense under Clinton (and no fan of the Bush administration), relays the following anecdote:

On October 11, 2001, a month to the day after the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W Bush faced an even more terrifying prospect. At that morning’s Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president that a CIA agent code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda terrorists possessed a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, this nuclear weapon was now on American soil, in New York City.

Think about it. A month after 9-11, you are president Bush.

You are still struggling to get to grips with the 9/11 attacks when you are told that the same people who have just destroyed twin towers have a nuclear weapon in New York city. What do you do? How do you defend the country?

A big scare like this is, to me, the only reasonable explanation of why Bush and his cadre of advisers have been so willing to push their response to the 9/11 attacks so far. Bush and his crew were – and remain – scared shitless. They are terrified that the next report won’t be a false alarm, and this fear informs every decision, every cost-benefit analysis they make. Don’t get me wrong, I believe many of the steps taken by the Bush administration have been badly misguided, and are likely to harm US interests in the long run. If Allison’s anecdote is true, it doesn’t excuse the Bush administration’s many bad decisions and policies, but it does go a long way towards explaining them.

Michelle Malkin lives for this. At Hoover, Blackfive was unimpressed:

What a let down. My buddy Ebo and I attended Horowitz’ opening night of Islamo-Fascism Awareness week and if this is our answer to sharia, then I guess Dirka Dirka Mohammed Jihad it will be.

I predict his kids will be voting Republican as soon as they get the chance:

You click off family’s electricity and make them go to bed at nine every night because it’s too dark to do anything else. You ban them from the elevator so they have to walk up and down nine flights of stairs. You take away their fridge so they can’t keep more than a day or two of food around the house.

All this and then they turn around and say it’s life as usual?

Some happier medium is surely possible.