Category: The Dish

"Use enough dynamite there Butch?" "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

A reader writes:

Is it true, as you wrote, that "people much further away from the levers of power saw more clearly than we did"?  Or is it possible their judgement, given the facts known at the time, was unsound and only redeemed by events and administration decisions they could not foresee, ie., too few troops, dissolution of the army, rejection of the Baathists, thousands of suicide bombers lined up for miles ready to blow Iraqi society into chaos, etc?  Their judgement that invading Iraq was a mistake turned out to be correct, but only in hindsight, not foresight.  Which begs the question – was the chaos in Iraq inevitable?  We will never know the answer, but not knowing the answer does not mean the pre-war naysayers "saw more clearly than we did."

Ouch.

A reader comments:

I read the articles on this study this morning and I think they’ve drawn this conclusion backwards. If you have ever known anyone who has a mental illness, then you know that because of the social stigma they tend to self medicate. Since marijuana is one of the easiest drugs to get a hold of it makes sense that people with problems would use it. I’d be willing to wager that you could find the same correlation with alcohol. While not advocating the use of marijuana, I think we should take a look at why these people are not getting the help they need. Instead we get shoddy science that serves an agenda.

I’m unsurprised.

One option for David Vitter.

It’s contagious today; it was fashionable yesterday. For five minutes. From the Atlantic in 1919:

The fat woman has been so long accustomed to commiseration that it may be difficult for her to realize her new dignity; we have all pitied her, been sorry for the bursting glove-clasp, the exuberant girth, the sweets desired but denied, the chin whose apparent hauteur was so unjust to the kindly heart beneath it; and above all for that plump palm laid upon our arm with its accompanying tremulous whisper, ‘Am I as fat as she, or she, or she?’

But now all that evil time is forgotten. The anti-fat nostrum, the recipes for rolling, the panting mountain climb, all the many-doctored advice, all the beauty-parlor pummeling—all this is obsolete, for obesity has come into its own. The corpulent dame now has dresses made to exhibit, not to conceal, her shapeliness; these throng authentic fashion-sheets. She has her own clothes, not the adapted ‘line’ of the lean and lovely sylph. The fat woman is no longer done out of her inheritance by a cruel and carping world. She has become a ‘stylish stout.’

(Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty.)

A Brit explains what it looks like from the other side of the pond:

It is an undisputed fact that most Americans don’t really like football. This failure to ‘get’ football is often interpreted by Brits as a sign of American insularity and philistinism. Exhibit A, m’lud, is that the Yanks don’t like draws. They want to see a winner. They want shoot-outs to settle games. Exhibit B is that Americans don’t like low-scoring games. The only thing that Americans hate more than 0-0 draws is Osama bin Laden. So short is the average American’s concentration span that, unless there’s a goal every two minutes, they’re trotting off to the catering stall to buy another chilli dog. Exhibit C is the fact that they insist on calling it ‘soccer’. M’lud, I rest my case.

The heathens are at it again.

It’s now the Democrats. Clinton bests Giuliani 28 to 20 percent. More interesting: Obama beats McCain 15 – 7 percent; and Romney crawls in at 2 percent. The public prefers Obama’s stance with foreign leaders to Clinton’s. Tell that to the Beltway.

Ambers’ Friday night special:

Monday’s YouTube debate launched the Turning Point of the race so far, as Obama and Hillary engaged in a substantive debate (played out over three days and ending in some nanny-nanny boo-boo) about foreign policy. Obama showed he is capable of being ballsy. Clinton demonstrated that M. Albright and R. Holbrooke still won’t get on a conference call together. Both sides proclaimed victory; the press deemed HRC the victor early and then changed its mind.

It was Obama’s week, despite Clinton’s great start.