Category: The Dish

When your husband is in jail. Half a million American women are in that position.

In a good way.

The data suggests so.

If this doesn’t cheer you up, nothing will:

"When a newly revitalized al-Qaeda carries out a 9/11-scale attack, you will own that one," – Senator Kit Bond, yesterday, to his Democratic colleagues in the Senate.

Here’s a tag-cloud of everything Senator Clinton said last night in the debate. The words are weighted depending on the frequency of her use of them. For all the candidates’ tag-clouds from last night, check this out. Forgive me, but I had a dinner with a friend.

Ahh, the culture war. Sometimes it’s too good to miss.

There will come a moment, I think, when even president Bush will realize that he cannot simply buck a majority of the American people, a majority of the Iraqi people, and a majority of the Congress in defense of an Iraqi parliament that is going into recess for two months this summer. There will therefore also come a moment in which the fear of the violence that will doubtless follow redeployment/withdrawal will seduce Washington into seeking a new "strongman" to keep Iraq whole. Con Coughlin thinks Sadr would never be able to pull this off, without a massive civil war. He wants a new dictator that’s both secularish and able to restore order. It’s the Saddam argument all over again. The trouble is two-fold. How does Bush square imposing a new strongman when he went to war to depose the old one? Secondly: there isn’t anyone out there right now. If America were to try and find and impose a new Saddam-lite, he would instantly lost whatever shred of legitimacy he might have had. This is not, in other words, a solution. It could compound the problem. The neocons wanted to foment unrest in the Middle East. In this, at least, they are going to succeed.

Interesting context:

[Scott J.] Bloch, a devout Catholic, has been under attack for three years in leading the independent investigative agency because of his interpretation of statutes covering workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. He also has been publicly accused of hiring too many Catholics. Clay Johnson, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and another Texan brought to Washington by Bush, joined the attack on Bush-appointee Bloch. The case became a cause celebre on the right when Bloch was told by a prominent Catholic layman close to Bush that it would be better if he just resigned.

Now, the tables are turned, with Bloch investigating the White House.

So it’s payback time? I wonder if Bloch, who has seven children, is in Opus Dei, or close to Novak’s own Opus Dei guru, Father John McCloskey. And I wonder who the "prominent Catholic layman close to Bush" is.

We live in a male-loathing therapeutic culture. But the crudeness of the most common formulations is absurd (and yes, I include MoDo). Masculinity comes in many forms; and it’s a sign of our culture’s weakness that we tend to see it only in terms of violence, machismo, homophobia, disrespect for women, and so on. Hip-hop and the Bush-Cheney administration have more in common on this score than they’d like to think. Maybe gay men can be part of the solution, in developing a culture of masculinity that draws on classical virtue, rather than pop-cultural dreck. Here’s a simple expression of the distinction between toxic masculinity and virtuous manliness. Money quote:

The basic good code of a certain brand of masculinity, as opposed to macho, is that you don’t pick fights, and that you never tolerate the strong bullying the weak. Bullying, in fact, is seen as a declaration of weakness – if you were strong, you wouldn’t be picking fights with weaklings, now would you? And if you were confident, you wouldn’t need to prove anything, would you? Certainly you don’t back down from a fight – but you don’t go looking for it either.