Category: The Dish

Over 1,000 more dead young Americans, and well over $100 billion to get to the same force level of a couple of years ago, with no prospect of a political settlement in Iraq. Lindsey Graham added it up:

We’re spending $9 billion a month to stay in Iraq. . . . So you’re saying to the Congress that you know that at least 60 soldiers, airmen and Marines are likely to be killed every month from now to July, that we’re going to spend $9 billion a month of American taxpayer dollars, and when it’s all said and done, we’ll still have 100,000 people there. You believe it’s worth it in terms of our national security interests to pay that price?

Petraeus said yes. But it’s not his decision. It’s the president’s and the Congress’s.

"I can only speak for myself and I’m a registered Republican, but last year I voted a straight Democratic ticket. First time in my life. The Republicans have kind of lost touch with reality," – Bob Elderkin, 68, who heads the town of Rifle’s chapter of the Colorado Mule Deer Association, a hunting group that has made common cause with environmentalists against drilling.

A reader writes:

Some parallels here with the end of gay culture, no? Take away the artist’s pain, lose the art. Take away the gay kid’s pain, lose our culture. I say, make ’em all suffer. Just let me have my Zoloft so I can enjoy the fruits of their anguish.

I hope that doesn’t sound too selfish.

He’s officially running for president, which will make the debates livelier, and help Americans better see what the base of the GOP believes in. And he has a clarifying statement of principles:

Top three issues, I think, at the moment, are clear. We have got to restore our respect for Declaration principle by defending life, and making it clear that life begins at conception and must be respected, from that moment, as the will of the Creator, God, because that’s what the Declaration establishes as our principle, and what the Constitution says we owe to our "posterity." That has to be clearly done, and clearly established.

Number two would be the restoration of our allegiance to and respect for God’s authority, especially when it comes to clear moral decisions like marriage, where we need to restore the sense that the God-given family is an unalienable right. I wrote about this, in articles that I’ve done over the last several weeks, trying to restore a sense of what our principles really mean, when it come to decisions like this.

And finally, across the board, I would be trying to restore the moral character and morale and sense of our commitment to our basic moral values, starting in the area of national sovereignty, both in terms of our security from terrorism, and especially the security of our borders, and our assertion of the sovereignty of the American people, which our elites have been betraying and trying to throw away.

Omar has a remarkable story of how al Qaeda managed to bring Shiites to the aid of neighboring Sunnis terrorized by an al Qaeda affiliate. Alas, the Baghdad government and US forces were not around to defend the Sunnis.

Mike Crowley has a first-person report.

It’s a very, very good thing that Anbar Sunni tribes see how toxic al Qaeda is. But we should not mistake a tactical alliance with a shift in underlying reality:

In a survey conducted Aug. 17-24 for ABC News, the BBC and NHK, the Japanese broadcaster, among a random national sample of 2,212 Iraqis, 72 percent in Anbar expressed no confidence whatsoever in United States forces. Seventy-six percent said the United States should withdraw now — up from 49 percent when we polled there in March, and far above the national average.

Withdrawal timetable aside, every Anbar respondent in our survey opposed the presence of American forces in Iraq — 69 percent "strongly" so. Every Anbar respondent called attacks on coalition forces "acceptable," far more than anywhere else in the country. All called the United States-led invasion wrong, including 68 percent who called it "absolutely wrong."

More skepticism here.

In days gone by, the Britney Spears meltdown may have died after a few days, or been contained to a few gossip or entertainment magazines. Now, everyone comments, including "Chris Crocker," a young man determined to keep gay culture well and truly alive, and countless parodies of same – see here and here. Seth Green, leading Hollywood actor, now parodies Crocker, anonymous YouTuber. Warhol really saw YouTube coming, didn’t he? Here’s Green, whose YouTube ended up on cable:

So many readers have described this article as the best thing they’ve read on the war in a very long time that it’s worth linking to it again. It certainly captures the psychology of some in this debate.

Giuliani will be kissing Thatcher’s ring next week. First Thompson, then Brown, now Rudy. A British Tory casts a skeptical forward look.