Category: The Dish

When you do the math, it’s all he’s got left right now, not counting the surge.

I’ve alluded to it before, but here’s a better summary of the issues. Money quote:

Don Imus doesn’t think he’s a racist. He says, over and over again, that he’s "a good person who said a bad thing." At times he has even seemed outraged that anyone could think he’s a racist, and his defenders seem even more outraged. I heard Tony Blankley on NPR last night insist that anyone who knows Imus has no doubt that he’s not a racist.

I believe them. Or at least I believe that they believe it themselves.

The endless rehashing of this issue in the media has, of course, paid a lot of attention to the race gap: A lot of whites don’t get why blacks are so upset by Imus, and a lot of blacks don’t get how whites could be so dense. But the under-reported and under-analyzed part of the Imus story isn’t the race gap, it’s how the race gap combines with the generation gap.

Lost in the news last week was the import of the Sunni/Qaeda destruction of "Jisr al-Hadeed", the iron bridge, that appears to have been of great sentimental importance to many Iraqis. Omar Fadhil at ITM writes:

I have many beautiful memories of Jisr al-Hadeed; memories of how many times I sat in that coffee shop and stared at the glittering reflections of its lights on the water, of how many evenings I sat under it with friends. When we were young and couldn’t drink at home, the Nazla (the river bank immediately under the bridge) was one of our favorite spots. Once there we’d drink cold beers in hot summer nights, with the sound of the slow and small waves of the Tigris as our music….

The terrorists wanted to stop normal life with this attack and they succeeded. Transportation between Karkh and Rasafa just got more difficult than ever. In addition, many people will avoid being on bridges for fear of similar attacks in the future. Technically, the northern half of the city is now left with no usable bridges. Those in the southern half are either too far for most Baghdadis, closed, or have a dangerous spot at one of their ends.

Heart-breaking, like so much else in that country right now.

The BBC’s interviewers are not as deferent as some in America. Paxman is among the most aggressive. What staggers me about this clip is Bolton’s point-blank view that the US had no responsibility to impose order after the invasion, and no responsibility for security within the country. Bolton actually says that the only error Bush really made was not giving the Iraqis "a copy of the Federalist papers and saying, ‘Good luck.’" Yes, he says he’s exaggerating for effect, but he is conveying the gist of the policy. The casual recklessness and arrogance of these people never cease to amaze. The world is theirs’ to play with – and the victims of predictable and predicted violence are left to help themselves:

"We’ve got to admit to ourselves, that it was not the first time that we heard the word ‘ho.’ Turn on the radio station. There are a whole lot of songs that use the same language … we’ve been permitting it in our homes, and in our schools and on iPods," – Barack Obama, Friday.

Kennebunk, Maine, half an hour ago.

Here’s an email from a regular emailer – the kind you’d read every day many times a day if we had open comments sections. He’s responding to this post which noted a remarkable 30-point Democratic advantage among those under 30. Here is his response:

Below is what the "30 point lead" link connected to.

Democrats lead by five percentage points among men, by fourteen points among women. Nancy Pelosi’s party holds a staggering 30-percentage point lead among voters under 30. Separate surveys have shown that a declining number of Americans now identify themselves as Republicans.

So voters under thirty are neither men nor women. Okay, what are they? What is their sex?  Are they human, never mind American citizens?

"Nancy Pelosi’s party holds a staggering…"

Wow, when did Nancy Pelosi form her own party? I am going out on a limb here, but since I didn’t hear about that, and I pay closer attention to what happens in politics then the average person, and with young people, especially under thirty, being notorious for ignoring politics, this is meaningless because only the hard core political junkies would even know about Pelosi forming her own party, the sample is too small AND the reporter is obviously an anti-American Socialist.

The other thing Andrew, with AIDS and all, I am still very surprised you fell for it, because the obvious. Who, what sane person, is even thinking about politics, never mind identity, in late March and early April after an election and twenty months before the next one?

The GOP is in great shape, isn’t it? I have no idea why voters under thirty are abandoning it in droves.

Victor Gold’s new book is raising a ruckus. He is, of course, an excitable hysterical leftist. He has all the credentials:

Gold was a speechwriter for Bush Sr. and was a prominent Goldwater disciple. He is a personal friend of the Bush family and many other prominent politicians. His previous books include Looking Forward, the autobiography of George H. W. Bush, and a satirical fiction, The Body Politic, coauthored with Lynne Cheney.

See what I mean? Obvious RINO. The title of his new book says a lot. It’s called "Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How The Holy Rollers and the Neocons Destroyed the GOP". Money quote:

In Tom DeLay’s eyes, as we might have guessed, God isn’t just a registered Republican but an activist who works up wedge issues to keep the party base engaged…. No event or pseudo-event since the rise of the Theo-Cons in the 1980’s better exemplifies their contempt for traditional conservative values than the crass exploitation of the Terri Schiavo case by a Republican White House and congressional majority in the spring of 2005.

Pause here to get our political and, more importantly, constitutional bearings: For point of reference, no Congress in history—not even the most liberal, loose-constructionist Congress of the New Deal or Great Society eras—ever considered ordering the federal courts to take jurisdiction over an individual case involving powers reserved to the states.

Excitable. Hysterical. Leftist. RINO. More, please.

That seems pretty clear now.

"The practice of secret courts. The use of torture to secure confessions. The receipt of secret evidence. The exclusion of the public from proceedings. The offering of evidence in the form of summaries delivered to the judges, without the defendant being able to confront the evidence or conduct a cross-examination. These practices were the definition of tyrannical injustice to the Puritan fathers and the Founding Fathers. We thought them long-banished a hundred years and more before our own revolution. And now suddenly here they are again.

Secrecy has reemerged just as torture has made its comeback, being justified on the public stage, by government officials for the first time since the famous gathering at the Inns of Court in 1629 at which the judges declared “upon their and their nation’s honor” that torture was not permitted by the common law. The two fit together, hand in glove: torture and secrecy. Torture and secrecy. Where one is used, the other is indispensable," – Scott Horton, in remarks given at NYU last week.