Category: The Dish

"Bush was really not much of a Republican at all – more like a retarded Christian AA version of Woodrow Wilson. He spent like crazy and he got America involved in these crazy "let’s export the wonderfulness of us" adventures. Because America these days has a cultural memory of about four seconds no one remembers that this is not the way Republicans used to act, but once Bush finally blew up, the door opened for some canny people in the party to remind everyone of that fact, " – Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone. Actually, some of us pointed this out before Bush blew up. The basic thesis of "The Conservative Soul" is holding up well.

A rave review from the religious right:

Besides Obama, how many times have you seen a presidential candidate get up in front of a large crowd and talk in depth about his salvation? I’ll give you the answer: Zero. For Obama to stand up and talk about how Jesus changed his life, my friends that takes guts. You may disagree with everything he’s about, you may disagree with his policy goals but as Christians, shouldn’t we like it when someone talks about Christ being the missing ingredient in his life? …

Barack Obama seems to want to bring the country together as best he can on this issue of faith and politics. His heart appears as though it’s in the right place. To “call out” leaders of the Christian Right like that seemed a little too broad for my taste. (watch those comments here )He blanketed a lot of people with one broad brush. If you really look closely at those leaders of the Christian Right, it doesn’t seem fair to pigeonhole all of them in the same category and to say all they care about are abortion, gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design. These leaders have spoken out and taken action on issues like the genocide in Darfur, poverty in America, torture techniques, helping people after devastating natural disasters, etc. Do they focus on abortion and gay marriage more than progressives? Yes but is that such a crime to believe that God would be against it?

To me though, the criticism of the religious right was a small part of the speech. I saw it more as an uplifting speech that can bring people of faith together. For example, Obama talked about how God SHOULD NOT be removed from the public square.

Yes, Obama is aggressively staking his candidacy in part on an explicitly religious appeal. In this, he is Bush’s natural successor, and threatens to make secular politics even more elusive in a fundamentalist age. He also threatens, if he pulls it off, to be a transformational candidate, turning American politics into a battleground primarily between those who believe the Gospels mandate an expansive welfare state and those who believe they mandate government’s moral regulation of human birth, death and sex. For my part, I believe Jesus had no politics, let alone the big government politics of our time. And the attempt of both right and left to coopt his truth corrupts faith and politics simultaneously.

A reader writes:

It’s good that Jeff Weintraub notices Condi’s pulling out the "no one saw it coming" canard. Again.

Back to her record in the her job as National Security Advisor, people seem to conveniently forget that the United States was attacked on Condi/Bush’s watch, not 8 days or 8 weeks but 8 months into Bush’s administration.  And Condi and her team had been forewarned that terrorists were plotting to use civilian airliners as weapons. Several documents in the public domain, one read aloud during those 9/11 Commission hearings, prove it. In fact, in the two years preceding the attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command held exercises simulating hijacked airlines used as weapons to cause mass civilian casualties. Chillingly, one of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center. So when Condi said that the national security apparatus – which she headed – was as surprised as anyone, she was….lying.

As to her legendary steadfastness in the face of criticism, that steadfastness continues in the face of decisions that have been proven disastrous or whose asserted rationale has been proven untrue. Here, one recalls Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Interestingly, Rice has been "flexible" when her position made consistency, er, difficult and uncomfortable. As George Will also pointed out in 2004, in 2000 Rice questioned the use of U.S. military forces in peacekeeping operations, saying "Carrying out civil administration and police functions is simply going to degrade the American capability to do the things America has to do…we don’t need the 82d Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten." Yet the vast majority of what our military is doing in Iraq is "nation-building" and "civil administration." This is but one example of her striking about-faces…such as her sea change since 1999 when called upon to tutor then-Governor Bush in foreign affairs, and she said "I would expect the United State to probably intervene less. I think there has been a somewhat promiscuous use of power in the Cold War era."

Now I remember why I preferred Bush to Gore on foreign policy in 2000. Less interventionist. More humble. Ha ha ha ha ha sniffle.

Don’t miss the second installment in the WaPo Cheney investigation. If you had any doubt that torture was in fact policy endorsed at the highest levels of government, against the law and against our treaty obligations, then read it. Now recall that almost all of the abuses at Abu Ghraib were in conformance with the new policy, adopted by the president himself:

The vice president’s lawyer advocated what was considered the memo’s most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line of torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit torture," that passage stated, "do not apply" to the commander in chief, because Congress "may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."

That same day, Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo signed off on a second secret opinion, the contents of which have never been made public. According to a source with direct knowledge, that opinion approved as lawful a long list of specific interrogation techniques proposed by the CIA – including waterboarding, a form of near-drowning that the U.S. government classified as a war crime in 1947. The opinion drew the line against one request: threatening to bury a prisoner alive.

The story of how Addington and Cheney gutted the key protections against torture in the Detainee Treatment Act is fleshed out by Gellman and Becker with convincing clarity. They helpully chart Cheney’s and Addington’s tireless campaign to oppose all restrictions and then to get around the restrictions with legalistic loopholes, inserted at the last minute.

The only defense by Bush and Cheney against charges of war crimes is that a president definitionally cannot commit war crimes, if he’s acting as he sees fit in the defense of the nation. It cannot even be deemed restricted to foreign lands – because Cheney’s view of the war on terror includes American soil and allows the president to detain and torture American citizens. As such, it is a doctrine completely toxic to democratic self-government and to the entire principle of a president obedient to the rule of law. It is tyranny – enabled by lawyers. It is really stunning in retrospect how adamant Cheney is on this, and how utterly contemptuous of public and world opinion he is. It is almost as if torture is his primary weapon in the war. You get the distinct sense that, in wartime, he finds democracy itself repugnant. The feeling, Mr Vice-president, is mutual.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty.)

Jim Fallows, who knows about these things, says this new study matters:

    * 69.6% of Google’s [first page results] were unique to Google.
    * 79.4% of Yahoo’s were unique to Yahoo.
    * 80.1% of Live’s were unique to Live.
    * 75.0% Ask’s were unique to Ask.

My valedictory defense of Blair is here.

The parameters of the September decision on Iraq are beginning to come into sharper focus. The posturing begins with quiet feelers from the White House for some kind of face-saver from the Congress:

White House officials have not indicated how a compromise might look. Administration officials and some Democrats favor shifting U.S. forces to a support role: fighting insurgents, training Iraqi forces and providing other backup. Many Democrats want such a shift in the next few months, but Bush has said Iraq must become more stable first. In a news conference last month, Bush said he "would like to see us in a different configuration at some point in time."

But when you examine the idea of merely providing training, it falls apart upon inspection. By all accounts, the Iraqi army is in no shape to take the lead with US training:

The American commander in Baquba, Brig. Gen. Mick Bednarek, and his counterpart south of Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, pointed to a variety of problems with the Iraqi forces, including a shortage of trained troops and a lack of basic supplies like ammunition, radios and trucks.

"They’re not quite up to the job yet," General Bednarek said in an interview with The Associated Press in Baquba.

At the same time, the surge has, in fact, a de facto expiration date of next April, whatever the politicians’ spin:

The reality, officials said, is that starting around April the military will simply run out of troops to maintain the current effort.

By then, officials said, Mr. Bush would either have to withdraw roughly one brigade a month, or extend the tours of troops now in Iraq and shorten their time back home before redeployment. The latter, said one White House official, "is not something the president wants to do" and would likely become a centerpiece of the 2008 presidential campaign.

What Bush is hoping for, obviously, is that by next April he will have enough of a facade of "progress" to start withdrawing troops without looking like the man who lost a war. The Democrats therefore have two options. They can begin to cut off funding in September. If they don’t get a veto-proof majority, and the president refuses to budge, they can still argue that they are doing all they can. Or they can try to provide cover for the president in crafting some kind of bullshit exercize in which "training" becomes the public goal, while withdrawal is the reality.

At this point, it seems to me, their political and moral objective should be simply to withdraw as many troops from a self-defeating occupation as swiftly and as shrewdly as possible. After the brutal partisanship with which they have been treated, why should they help Bush now? That’s why, I think, Cheney is trying to extend the war. He can’t win in Iraq or Washington under the current conditions. So he’s trying to extend it by a game-changing expansion of the conflict.

(Photo: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty.)

The barbarism called female genital mutilation, in which the clitoris is cut or removed from young girls, is on a different scale of horror than male circumcision. Which is why it's good news that Egypt's Grand Mufti has just pronounced that Islam forbids it. Pity a young girl had to die for him to speak up.

The continuation of the neoconservative campaign to extend the losing war in Iraq to Iran can be read in the words of Josh Muravchik today:

The apparent meaning of all of this pointless provocation and bullying is that the axis of radicals – Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah – is feeling its oats. In part its aim is to intimidate the rest of us, in part it is merely enjoying flexing its muscles. It believes that its side has defeated America in Iraq, and Israel in Gaza and Lebanon. Mr. Ahmadinejad recently claimed that the West has already begun to "surrender," and he gloated that "final victory … is near." It is this bravado that bodes war.

A large portion of modern wars erupted because aggressive tyrannies believed that their democratic opponents were soft and weak. Often democracies have fed such beliefs by their own flaccid behavior. Hitler’s contempt for America, stoked by the policy of appeasement, is a familiar story. But there are many others. North Korea invaded South Korea after Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that Korea lay beyond our "defense perimeter." Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait after our ambassador assured him that America does not intervene in quarrels among Arabs. Imperial Germany launched World War I, encouraged by Great Britain’s open reluctance to get involved. Nasser brought on the 1967 Six Day War, thinking that he could extort some concessions from Israel by rattling his sword.

I think Josh believes that the US, with 150,000 troops in Iraq, thousands more in Afghanistan, and massive hardware in the Persian Gulf, is currently being "flaccid".

She’s an extraordinary woman and it does not surprise me she has the courage that so few other leading Democrats (or, of course, Republicans) have when it comes to acceptance of gay humanity and civil equality.