Category: The Dish

Finally gets a serious rapid responder.

In honor of Friedrich’s 163rd birthday (Monday), here’s a classic Atlantic piece by one great American iconoclast about one great Polish one. Yes, Polish:

As for Nietzsche himself, the one firm faith of his life was his belief in his Polish origin. He cultivated a disorderly, truculent, and what he conceived to be Polish façade, wearing an enormous and bristling mustache. He wrote a book, which was privately printed, to prove that the true form of his name was Nietzschy, and that it was Polish and noble. It delighted him when the people at some obscure watering-place, deceived by his looks, nicknamed him ‘The Polack.’ The one unforgivable insult was to call him a German…

Do not mistake me here. I am not saying that the Germans adopted Nietzsche in any general and unanimous sense, as the Arabs, for example, adopted Mohammed, or as the Americans adopted the Declaration of Independence.

To the common people he was inevitably a dose of very bitter caviare: in so far as they were aware of him at all, they could scarcely understand him, and in so far as they could understand him, they were mocked and outraged by him. Nor was he more palatable to the elements which represented, in the new empire, the ideas carried over from the last and previous ages—for example, the adherents of the church and the survivors and mourners of the old aristocracy. For that church and that aristocracy he had only the fiercest of scorn. Against the one he was yet to launch _The Antichrist_, without question the most devastating attack ever made upon Christian morals in ancient or modern times. And at the aristocracy he had already flung the insult of ranking it second in his new order of castes, putting it with ‘those whose eminence is chiefly muscular,’ and dismissing it as fit only to ‘execute the mandates of the first caste, relieving the latter of all that is coarse and menial in the work of ruling.’ Nor were these the only groups which found little but effrontery and atheism in his new scheme of things. He was iconoclast even before he was prophet. His whole philosophy was a herculean treading upon toes.

The president, he believes, can break some laws. But he’ll try to prevent complete lawlessness in the executive branch. Good grief.

Heilemann says so. From his mouth to God’s ears.

What happens when 111 guys decide to go to the Abercrombie Store in NYC and coordinate a collective shirt-removal at 4.37 pm? A mild amount of culture clash. Heh:

Soon enough, the model growled: "I’m not playing your game any more." Video here.

"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.

"[Sullivan] is concerned with the essence of ideas — less the parade of personalities and more the transformation of political discourse… Like a good conservative, he is concerned about loss, specifically the alarmingly rapid disappearance of a conservative tradition — which could be reflected in different constellations by Eisenhower, Goldwater and Reagan — almost immediately after it was being judged politically triumphant. Sullivan saw, earlier and far more keenly than most, the rupture in American conservatism between the Theocons and the small-government, balanced-budget, personal-freedom conservatism that characterized Goldwater," – Scott Horton, Harper’s.

The book is available for purchase here.

He won’t say if the Khmer Rouge technique is torture, i.e. the infliction of "severe mental or physical pain or suffering" to elicit information. Also: if the sky is blue, it’s blue.

"You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement," – Democratic Congressman Pete Stark.

Dahlia Lithwick tackles the latest, astonishing claim by the Bush administration on military detainees:

The only thing more terrifying than convictions based on secret evidence is the possibility that when it comes time to fight those convictions, the secret evidence might just disappear.

Yes, it’s true:

In a petition filed last Friday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the DoJ argues that it cannot possibly comply with the federal appeals court’s order of last July to turn over this evidence. Reasoning: 1) Disclosure could "seriously disrupt the Nation’s intelligence-gathering programs" and cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security." No surprise there. But it also argues that 2) the information used against the detainees at the CSRTs "is not readily available, nor can it be reasonably recompiled."

You will recall that the critical DVD that threatened to verify Jose Padilla’s accusations of torture in US custody … also was mysteriously "lost" by the government when it finally came to trial:

The missing DVD dates from March 2, 2004. It contains a video of the last interrogation session of Padilla, then a declared ‘enemy combatant’ under an order from President Bush, while he was being held in military custody at a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. But in recent days, in the course of an unusual court hearing about Padilla’s mental condition, a government lawyer disclosed to a surprised courtroom that the Defense Intelligence Agency — which had custody of the evidence — was no longer able to locate the DVD. As a result, it was not included in a packet of classified DVDs that was recently turned over to defense lawyers under orders from Judge Cooke.

Yes, this is America.