Category: The Dish

Chris Orr gets it right:

a) It’s okay for the president – not just legally, but morally – to fire any and all U.S. attorneys any time he feels they are not adequately pursuing his priorities; b) it’s okay if those priorities include getting more members of his own party elected; and c) the whole thing is a pseudo-scandal until the evidence of explicit obstruction of justice reaches a threshold where it is beyond dispute.

Yep, that’s about it. And the real problem with Gonzales is that he didn’t come out and defend this brazen politicization of the justice system to the Congress in the first place. No word from Charles about the bypassing of the Senate with the secret clause slipped into the Patriot Act. But avoidance of such matters is no longer that rare. Charles used to be one of sanest, fairest conservative commentators around. But defending Bush through thick and thin and even torture has clearly taken its toll.

A new survey in the Lancet comes to a sane conclusion about the relative dangers of various drugs:

Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was ecstasy.

That’s why we criminalize pot and ecstasy, and allow massive distribution of booze and tobacco. Marijuana is a gateway drug, after all. If you smoke it you might move on to far more dangerous substances, like beer.

A reader writes:

Your post about The Pillowman is very interesting; it’s a play about which I have profoundly mixed emotions, but your thoughts on it are very illuminating. It’s interesting to note that McDonagh wrote the play over ten years ago—apparently all of his works were written in an astonishing burst of creativity that covered a year or two. Since then, he has been parceling out the works; now, he’s turning to film. Obviously, he couldn’t have had the current political situation on his mind when he started typing, but the play certainly speaks to the moment in which we find ourselves.

If you haven’t seen or read it, I highly recommend his play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore. It’s an even more astonishing piece, to my mind — a farce about terrorism and the IRA — but what a bracing piece of work. For now and for all time, he exposes terrorism as the last refuges of fools, morons, and the morally bankrupt. It probably doesn’t read as well as it plays, but plays like a house on fire.

As to your remark about not being sure what happened in the play, when it opened on Broadway, a number of fans in the Broadway chat rooms speculated that the entire play was yet another of Katurian’s stories, and, in fact, had never happened at all. It’s a notion that certainly supports one of the play’s major themes, on the unbridled vitality of the writer’s imagination. I wrote a piece about the production’s design, and when I put this point to the set and lighting designers, they insisted that such an idea had never occurred to them. Still, it seems possible to me …

The play is great precisely because it transcends any particular moment in time or history and because it is open to multiple levels of interpretation, even about the basic facts in the play itself. McDonagh is clearly, it seems to me, one of the most brilliant playwrights alive today.

A liberal takes a shot:

I really am not against Senator Clinton or her presidential candidacy. But I really would like to be rid of Mark Penn and the kind of unimaginative, narrow – and narrowing – thinking that he signifies in American politics.

Norwich, Vermont, 10.51 am.

Never under-estimate the power of beagles.

I spent part of last night absorbing the latest comprehensive Pew report on trends in public opinion over the last decade. It’s a devastating indictment of the Bush-Rove strategy for conservatism and the Republican party. They may have created the most loyally Democratic generation since the New Deal with the under 25s. But check the other findings out. Party identification is now 50 percent Dem and 35 percent GOP. The country is now divided in two over the question of whether military strength is the key to ensuring peace; in 2002 62 percent were hawks and 34 percent were doves. Religious intensity is falling; acceptance of gay people is rising. The younger generation is the most secular of any. Support for the military has never been stronger – people don’t blame the troops for the war. The country is divided down the middle on torture, but still in favor of preemptive war in some circumstances. Sorry, Dinesh, but women’s equality and freedom are values now overwhelmingly popular among all groups, including Republicans, and strongest among the young. Since Bush has been president, there has been a sharp decline in the number of Americans favoring "old fashioned values about family and marriage." In the last ten years, opposition to gay marriage has dropped ten points and support has risen ten points. There has also been a striking twelve point increase in support for affirmative action over the past decade – all of it among whites.

It turns out that Karl Rove has gone a long way toward securing a permanent majority in American politics … for liberals and Democrats. The collapse of a coherent, freedom-loving, reality-based conservatism is surely part of the reason.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

The military is bringing technology and bio-technology to make US soldiers the most advanced fighters in the world. call it the human enhancement project. I linked to Noah Schachtman’s blog post on mind-reading earlier today. Here’s a more comprehensive piece on the latest developments.

The cut-ups on many conservative blogs mock the idea that depriving people of sleep indefinitely is anything close to torture. Stalin disagreed. But one blog decided to find out what happens to the brain when deprived of sleep. Here’s part of the journal. This is the post after 126 hours without sleep:

i am certiain i am hearing audioty hallcunations – i hear a cat mewo despite thatfact thast i own no cats. i also hear a weird series of bleeps in different tones – i cannot find the sourceo f them. i snap in and out of an almost trancelike state wher i look at a random object an space out. ifeel delirious, a frien came over to check on me asi told him to, and he thought it was funny that my statements were halfbaked nonsensical jibberish. i no longer simply walk – it is more of a staggerlike lurchin g. my balance is also off. out of the corner of my eyes i believe im seeing visual disturbances an interruptions. no hallucinations – i imagin thos come muhc later – just ripples an slight distortions in my periphial. it may not even be a true hallucination, just delerium.

That’s after five days. Now imagine this continuing for the better part of a month – in solitary confinement, and often in shackles and stress positions, as the Bush administration has done to prisoners at Gitmo. And think of the quality of intelligence we’re getting at the end of it. The point of torture is now and always has been only torture. The full log is here.

It’s more than a problem; it’s a nightmare waiting to happen. This symposium helps explain why.