Category: The Dish

If you want a heart-breaking glimpse into the incompetence of president Bush and vice-president Cheney, and the viciousness of the enemy they are losing to, just take a look at what U.S. troops are dealing with in Baquba, Iraq. Because of insufficient troops and hapless war-management, we have spent four years helping Islamist terrorists develop skills, financing and tactics that are the equal of any insurgent army in the world. And the number of troops we have sent is just enough to keep losing and yet also train Islamist thugs and butchers. We should start thinking of vast tracts of Iraq as terror-training camps unwittingly set up by the president. Here’s the murderous stew this president’s policy has spawned:

Despite recent seizures of stockpiles, the insurgents have a ready supply of artillery shells and material to make bombs, the biggest killer of American troops here. Some bombs destroy American vehicles. Some are used to booby-trap houses to crash down on Americans. Some are used in larger battle plans: Before overrunning an Iraqi Army outpost south of Baquba, guerrillas laid bombs on the road that Iraqi and American forces would later use to try to rescue the outpost. The minefield blocked the reinforcements, and the Iraqi soldiers at the outpost fled.

The guerrillas seem increasingly well organized and trained. An insurgent force trying to overrun an American outpost in southern Baquba was repelled only after American soldiers fired more than 2,000 Coke-bottle-size rounds from Bradley fighting vehicles and 13,000 rounds from M-240 machine guns.

"They were firing from every direction, trying to get us to concentrate on one spot while the other guys were maneuvering," said Cpl. Bill McGrath, who said the M-240 barrels glowed cherry red and had to be swapped out a half-dozen times. "These were well-trained military types, not like the guys who shoot tanks with AK-47s. A lot of these guys we never saw. We’d just see muzzle flashes."

The tactics reflect the skill and resolve of the insurgency here, soldiers say. "To say the guys we are fighting are any less smarter than me, that would be crazy," said Lt. Col. Morris Goins, commander of the 1-12 Combined Arms Battalion.

The only safe space in Baquba is an outpost housing U.S. soldiers who are also being killed at a higher rate in Baquba than elsewhere in the "country." The soldiers, like most soldiers, have a reality-based name for their outpost. They call it Disneyland. It would describe the White House right now as well.

(Photo: Iraqis search for missing relatives among the bodies of victims of violence outside the morgue of a hospital in the restive city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, 03 December 2006, as sixteen Iraqis were killed in acts of violence in the city. By Ali Yussef/AFP/Getty.)

Is conservatism about academic and professional excellence or is it about promoting a religious ideology, regardless of skills and ability? Under Bush, Cheney and Rove, it has become much more of the latter than the former. This email to Jonah Goldberg strikes me as rooted in the conservatism I used to know and support:

Call me an elitist, but if we are going to have devout Christians in the Justice department, I would prefer they went to Chicago or Stanford Law. I think there is something to be said about high LSAT scores and going to one of the best schools in the country. And I have never bought the canard that there are no conservatives at the best law schools. Robert, Alito, Scalia? Bill Maher had a great point on his show the other night. The lawyer Monica Goodling hired went to a real law school.

Of course, Mickey Kaus feels the need to defend the far-right. Mickey now spends his energies primarily defending the furthest extremes of right-wing culture. He’s not pro-Christianist hacks, of course. He’s just against anyone who might be against them. As a Democrat of course. A Tom-Tancredo-Ann-Coulter kind of Democrat.

Has anyone done a study on Hollywood Derangement Syndrome? It occurs when usually sensible people live and breathe among smug, sanctimonious, self-righteous Hollywood lefties … and become defenders of Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales just to stay balanced. I can think of a few victims.

A veteran of the department speaks:

I was [in the Justice Department] again in the Watergate era, when I worked in part of the Attorney General’s Office during my first year of law school in 1973-1974, and then continuously as a trial attorney and office director for nearly 30 years. That adds up to more than a dozen attorneys general, including Ed Meese as well as John Mitchell, and I used to think that they had politicized the department more than anyone could or should. But nothing compares to the past two years under Alberto Gonzales.

To be sure, he continued a trend of career/noncareer separation that began under John Ashcroft, yet even Ashcroft brought in political aides who in large measure were experienced in government functioning. Ashcroft’s Justice Department appointees, with few exceptions, were not the type of people who caused you to wonder what they were doing there. They might not have been firm believers in the importance of government, but generally speaking, there was a very respectable level of competence (in some instances even exceptionally so) and a relatively strong dedication to quality government, as far as I could see.

Then Gonzales arrived – and the graduating class of Pat Robertson’s law school.

He’s over them.

Wonder what the newly installed, Rove-approved U.S. Attorneys are up to? You guessed it. No big surprise that Scott Schools once contributed to Strom Thurmond either.

"There are some people the Clintons consider Clinton people who have gotten behind Barack. And there will be total retribution if the opportunity presents itself," – a longtime friend of Bill and Hillary’s. LOL.

If you haven’t read Tom Friedman’s NYT essay yesterday, then do yourself a favor. What I take from it is not just that we need to launch an unprecedented effort to reduce CO2 emissions for the climate’s sake, but that we cannot win the war against Islamist terror without it. It’s going to be a very long war, we have lost the early battles, and we have fatefully decided temporarily to wage it on the enemy’s terms. A longer war requires taking the enemy’s primary weapon away from him: petro-dollars. Money quote:

Being serious starts with reframing the whole issue — helping Americans understand, as the Carnegie Fellow David Rothkopf puts it, "that we’re not ‘post-Cold War’ anymore — we’re pre-something totally new." I’d say we’re in the "pre-climate war era." Unless we create a more carbon-free world, we will not preserve the free world. Intensifying climate change, energy wars and petroauthoritarianism will curtail our life choices and our children’s opportunities every bit as much as Communism once did for half the planet.

Going green is integral to preserving liberty for the next generation. You don’t have to go a government-heavy route. Friedman’s favorite policy tool is also Steve Chapman’s: a carbon tax. The market will do the rest. And if someone can actually explain to Americans that this sacrifice is worth it – that it’s the real, long-term answer to the mass-murderers of 9/11 – then he or she deserves to be the next president. Right now, none of them does. So who’s gonna bite the carbon tax bullet? Senator Obama? Senator Thompson? Do you really want to defeat Islamism? Or not?

A reader writes:

My partner and I were at her parents’ house this weekend in eastern NC. They are people who grew up in a segregated South and would not be upset if life, in some instances, had remained that way.

So much to our surprise this weekend, they both declared they were voting for Obama! I literaly almost fell out of the recliner! I was like "What did you just say?" They laughed and said, "Yeah, we are voting for him because we agree with his views and we are sick of Bush and his stubborness and arrogance towards the war." Being the smart ass that I am, I told them if they had seen Obama on TV and knew that he was black. They just smiled and said, "Yes, so what? We need serious change in this country."

Whoever captures that mood best will win the presidency. And, no, I don’t think the email was planted by an Obama staffer.

A reader writes:

The BBC interview with John Bolton illuminates the several inconsistent agendas and fantasies of the people who pulled the trigger on this war.

Now Bolton tells us that all he ever wanted us to do was go in quickly, knock out Saddam, and get out fast, let the Iraqis figure out how to then govern themselves – and who should step in after Saddam. Never mind what State Department wusses thought about Sunni/Shia divides, possible civil war, etc. Not our problem. These bad guys only understand the language of force, of brutality (and apparently torture) and death.

Even if any of this were largely true from his vantage point on things — it goes to show how de-centered or multi-focused the whole mess was even as it unfolded in the White House and Pentagon – how at odds with one another were so many of the key players in terms of ultimate goals, agendas, and tactical plans. The interview also hints at inconsistencies of huge importance: that these war-mongers recognized that Iraq had no cultural basis for decent political governance after the dictatorship — but no matter: we should decapitate it anyway and let them arrive at good governance on their own in quick time.

Bolton seems to say that he’d rather live in that failed state than a dictatorship. But he doesn’t live over there now does he? This "failed state" is currently on a par with Dante’s hell. As an external threat, we had already defanged Saddam. This whole thing seems to have been about projecting our power and fantasizing about hitting a home run — turning up a good, functioning, state democracy, friendly to the US, out of that cauldron. Who pays? Mostly the Iraqi people.

A final email (promise):

I have been hearing a lot about the ho/whore aspect of Don Imus’s language, but for me (white female) the worse phrase is ‘nappy-headed’.  Not that calling out someone’s short curly hairdo is necessarily a problem an insult, but, from what I could see in their press conference, there aren’t any ‘nappy headed’ women on the Rutgers basketball team. Don Imus used a generic (at best) stereotype to describe these athletes; he didn’t even see them.  Even if you could argue that with ‘ho’ he was making use of some variant of urban street culture, in using “nappy headed” he erased those women with their ponytails and their pageboys and their cornrows.  I react viscerally to this, and I think other women do too.

There is some debate over the meaning of the word "nappy." I believed it meant unkempt with specific reference to African-American hair. Others have said it means kinky or curly in the same way. But the two categories overlap, of course. Sexism and racism do as well.