Category: The Dish

The movie line contest ends at 5 pm today, and I hope to post the winners pretty soon thereafter. Our crack team of, er, Jessie, will be be adding it up because I am mathematically challenged. You can check the latest results in the five lists of ten here, here, here, here and here. You still have time to put your favorite over the top. Vote late and vote often.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"If we’ve learned anything from the debacle of the last six years, it’s that managing the government and getting it to do even the most basic tasks competently should not be under-estimated as a task."

No.

If there’s one thing we have learned from the debacle of the last six years, it is that the ability to run a tight political campaign has absolutely NOTHING TO DO with the ability to run the government.  Bush’s greatest detractors would not deny that he and Rove know how to bulldoze their political opponents; when it comes to running a campaign, they are competent at tasks both basic and advanced.

But we now know that this skill-set is just entirely divorced from the skill-set of running the country. Bush has shown that he has no idea of how to do that, in affairs domestic or international.  And his skill at campaigning has been a positive hindrance to his ability to perform his constitutional tasks.

It would be over-reaction to say that we should look for someone who runs a lousy campaign, in the hopes that they will care more about the country’s business than their party’s.  But even that would be more accurate than saying that we should closely scrutinize a campaign’s efficiency in order to see whether the candidate is competent to govern.

"I was suddenly in love. It was amazing. We seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriage," – Sana Klaric, 27, who found out that the anonymous stranger she was chatting up on the Internet was her husband. They’re now divorcing.

Marcia: yes; she had the sex but isn’t gay. Hillary: no; the focus group was adamant.

La Jolla, California, happy hour.

Drum sums it up:

Either someone is dead serious about planting some disinformation about a Syria-North Korea nuclear connection in the press, or else there really is such a connection. I don’t know what to think about it myself, but it’s now officially a story to follow.

That’s the current explanation for bringing in  Valerie Jarrett earlier than anticipated, Marc reports. My nagging worry about Obama is management capability. If we’ve learned anything from the debacle of the last six years, it’s that managing the government and getting it to do even the most basic tasks competently should not be under-estimated as a task. Romney seems to me to be the best qualified on this count, but Clinton’s campaign is reassurance that she can handle management as well (certainly better than her husband). I worry about Obama. The campaign does not appear to me to be the best-run out there; actual political reporters I’ve asked echo the complaint.  The good news is: Obama seems to have noticed and is doing something about it. We’ll see if he makes some progress.

If you don’t know the wonderful British writer, A.A. Gill, you should. Scorn doesn’t quite manage to sum up the prose he pours over the egos of those unfortunate enough to be reviewed by him. Here’s a paragraph a reader sent along from last weekend. Full disclosure – Gill writes for my paper, the Sunday Times. Money quote:

The play was the thing – a desperate, unbelievable, dramatically inert bit of third-degree embarrassment; secondhand agitprop cliché that would have shamed a drama-GCSE improv class. Not a single word or emotion or reaction was honest or believable or real. Again, I’m speechless with admiration for the Tristram who has been paid money, fed lunch and given a chair that goes up and down and has such insouciant confidence in the idiocy of his audience that he allowed this to be broadcast. And not just cast, but cast with good actors who had agents who suffered the same effortless belief and said: "Do it. Who cares? It’s cash." Finally, and most awe-inspiringly, that someone sat down at a keyboard, tapped away and made The Dinner Party – a crippling, dribbling, mewling homunculus of plagiarism. And, having done it, they didn’t turn white and book themselves into an ashram. They said: "This is cool. I’ll show it to the grown-ups", and pressed Send. The next time this writer sees his or her name in print, I abjectly pray it’s under "Employee of the month" at Burger King.

Try being a gay Republican. This sad quote from LaShawn Barber says it all:

"I truly believe that Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and John McCain can’t make it because of scheduling conflicts. I’m hopelessly naïve, I guess."

Yes, you are, LaShawn, you are.

The Bush administration has still more work to do in screwing up the Middle East and fomenting terrorism and Jihadism. Noah Schachtman notes the following developments in Anbar:

Sunni political and tribal leaders are increasingly throwing in their lot with U.S. forces here against Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent types. But, to get them to come over to our side, the American military has fed them a steady diet of anti-Shi’ite propaganda.

Arrests and killings of Shi’ite militants are announced from loudspeaker blasts; President Bush’s bellicose rhetoric towards Shi’a Iran is reported on friendly radio programs.

It makes sense if we are girding for a war with Iran. Having dismembered Iraq, the Bushies may now have an interest in polarizing it, as they have polarized the US. Rather than trying to stop a sectarian regional war, Cheney may be simply deciding to join it. The goal is to restrain Iran’s growing clout. Eric Martin sees the danger. Rob Farley fears the worst. Hilzoy adds:

One interpretation that [Martin] doesn’t consider is that we’re supporting the militias in Anbar not just for the short term political benefits (having some progress for General Petraeus to report, etc.), but also to placate our various Sunni allies, who would presumably not be happy if we simply left the Iraqi Sunnis to the tender mercies of their adversaries. This would be short-sighted and strategically incoherent — we are, after all, also trying to strengthen the Maliki government, which is to say the future enemy of the Sunnis we are apparently not just training but inciting to hatred. But I don’t see that that’s any reason to think that it’s not exactly what the Bush administration is doing.

It’s back to the 1980s. Instead of backing Saddam against Iran, we’re now in danger of backing the Iraqi Sunnis, in league with Egypt and Saudi Arabia … against Iran The border of the conflict has simply moved from the Iraq-Iran border to the middle of Iraq. And this time, we have 160,000 soldiers trapped in the middle. Yay! Just because it is hard to imagine how the situation in Iraq could get worse doesn’t mean that Cheney isn’t figuring out ways to do it. He’s got more than a year to foment more chaos and bloodshed and sectarian hatred and anti-American hatred. Give him time.