Category: The Dish

A school district bends over backwards not to offend Muslims. This has to be South Park-bait.

Here’s a fascinating glimpse into the disarray among the theocons and Christianists at the prospect of a Giuliani candidacy. They’re contemplating a third-party challenge. Yay! Money quote:

The threat emerged from a group that broke away for separate discussions at a meeting Saturday in Salt Lake City of the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative networking group. Participants said the smaller group included James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps its most influential member; Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Richard A. Viguerie, the direct-mail pioneer; and dozens of other politically oriented conservative Christians.

Almost everyone present at the smaller group’s meeting expressed support for a written resolution stating that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third-party candidate,” participants said.

The participants said that the group chose the qualified term “consider” because it had not yet identified an alternative candidate, but that it was largely united in its plans to bolt the party if Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, became the nominee.

They also seem to think time is running out to stop the front-runner, and if you check out the latest Gallup data on Republican support, you can see their point. The Christianists have suddenly given moderate Republicans an extra reason to vote for Rudy. If these religious fanatics can be forced out of the party at least temporarily, there’s a chance their influence can be restrained for longer. Of course this is not an easy choice. Giuliani is potentially dangerous to the survival of constitutional liberties in this country. Giuliani or Dobson? Who’s more dangerous to individual liberty? Discuss.

"Christopher Hitchens can be entertaining; that’s apparent in his work. But the statement above is a rant: you either agree with it absolutely 100 percent or you don’t. There’s no room for conversation here, no space for dialogue, no opportunity for mutual discovery, for actual learning. And that’s the stuff that causes us to engage intellectually, you might say makes us fully human," – R. Gustav Niebuhr, WaPo.

"All debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive-since by killing the person in question the murderer can promptly provide proof of the correctness of his statement. The only valid argument under such conditions is to promptly rescue the person whose death is predicted. Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it. The assertion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy it," – Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism.

Los Angeles, California, 7.28 pm.

If you’re getting an award from the first president Bush, you’re not supposed to mention the torture policy that his son has instituted.

Another point of agreement with Ahmadinejad – this time from a Columbia professor, no less.

Just because it’s unthinkable doesn’t mean this president won’t do it. The latest Sy Hersh piece adds fuel to the already looming consensus in Washington that Dick Cheney is insistent on war with Iran, and he’ll get it regardless of the rationale. If the WMD argument won’t work, there’s the careful way in which the administration and its supporters have been redefining the war in Iraq to one which is already a war with Iran:

Now the emphasis is on "surgical" strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism…

At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence official added, "There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President."

Which rat’s ass does this president care about, one wonders? But if these developments gather pace, Clinton also faces a problem. She just voted to designate the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist entity. Giving this president one authorization to go to war might be seen as a problem with the Democratic base. Giving him two should surely be a deal-breaker.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP.)

The murder of a Japanese journalist by the Burmese junta – shown on Japanese television above – may help jog public opinion in Japan over Burma. That may help put pressure on China. Well, its a hope.

Bob Reich counters the Clintons on the experience question:

While I can understand Bill Clinton’s eagerness to undermine his wife’s most significant primary opponent, he is not, I believe, completely ingenuous. I happened to talk with him in 1988 before he decided not to run, and also in 1991 before he decided to run the following year. His calculation at both times was decidedly rational and entirely political, based on whether he could win.

But more to the point, it strikes me as unfair to claim that Obama lacks relevant experience for the presidency. When he ran in 1992, Bill Clinton had been the governor of a small, rural southern state; as such, he had only limited experience with national issues and no foreign policy experience to speak of. Incidentally, at this point in the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton has served as an elected official in the U.S. Senate for not quite eight years, and before that a First Lady in the White House. Obama has so far held elective office for almost twelve years, at both levels of government – first as an Illinois state senator and then as a U.S. Senator. Before that he was a community organizer among Chicago’s poor, and then a civil rights lawyer – two experiences that in my view are critically relevant to anyone seeking to become president of all Americans. Obama’s international experience comes first hand – his father was a goat-herder in Kenya, and Obama spent a portion of his childhood in Indonesia. And as an African-American, with all the personal experience that implies, Obama seems particularly well qualified to understand the issues that need to be addressed in order to unify America and renew the nation’s moral authority around the world.