Category: The Dish

Dinesh D’Souza’s view, from his book:

Why Iraq? One reason is that after 9/11, a number of leading figures in the Bush administration came to the conclusion that, in the face of a catastrophe of this magnitude, it would not be sufficient to go to Afghanistan and shoot some people on the monkey bars. Rather, America needed to take action in the heart of the Middle East. Remember the old Western movies where John Wayne is called into town as the new sheriff to apprehend a bunch of cattle-stealers? He goes into the bar, where the bad guys are shouting and jeering at him. He doesn’t know who the culprits are, but he finds a couple of obstreperous hoodlums and slams their heads together, or pistol-whips them, and then he walks out of the bar. The message is that there is a new sheriff in town. After 9/11, I believe, the Bush administration wanted to convey this message to the Islamic radicals. In Saddam Hussein, Bush located an especially egregious hoodlum who would become the demonstration project for America’s seriousness and resolve.

A "demonstration project". Suddenly, the otherwise mystifyingly troop-free war-plan makes more sense, doesn’t it?

Most cool.

A philanthropy blogger thinks my challenge to HRC might be part of a new wave of scrutiny for charities and lobby-groups:

So a gay-rights organization with nearly 600,000 members now has to answer to a gay-rights blogger who has an estimated 60,000 daily readers. This episode raises the power of blogs and other new technologies, which are forcing nonprofits to be more open about their operations, holding them accountable not only to their financial supporters, but also an increasingly skeptic (and engaged) public.

Is this the future of nonprofit transparency? Public fights online between multi-million dollar nonprofit organizations and self-styled online watchdogs? According to Sullivan, the nonprofit has "asked for a private meeting with me. I’d rather bring a few thousand readers along."

More gay bloggers are demanding transparency and accountability.

The sadist-bigot trend continues in the popular culture, according to Slate:

Here are just a few of the categories that are not-so-vaguely conflated with the "bad" (i.e., Persian) side in the movie: black people. Brown people. Disfigured people. Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both). The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.

Meanwhile, the Spartans, clad in naught but leather man-briefs, fight under the stern command of Leonidas (Gerard Butler), whose warrior ethic was forged during a childhood spent fighting wolves in the snow. Leonidas likes to rally the troops with bellowed speeches about "freedom," "honor," and "glory," promising that they will be remembered for having created "a world free from mysticism and tyranny." (The men’s usual response, a fist-pumping "A-whoo! A-whoo!" sounds strangely fratty.) But Leonidas is not above playing the tyrant himself. When a messenger from Xerxes arrives bearing news Leonidas doesn’t like, he hurls the man, against all protocol, down a convenient bottomless well in the center of town. "This is blasphemy! This is madness!" says the messenger, pleading for his life. "This is Sparta," Leonidas replies.

Or "stuff happens," as someone else remarked. A reader counters:

I think there’s a huge flaw in trying to look for pro-Iraq War messages in 300: It’s a direct adaptation of a comic that was produced in the late 1990’s, long before 9/11, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the torture chic of 24, etc.  It’s about what it’s about: A small force working to repel an imminent invasion by a large empire, and an up-close look at the unpleasant reality that ideas like life, freedom and independence are ultimately upheld through violent struggle.  You can twist that around to make this or that point about our current conflicts — from either direction, if you try — but to say that the whole work was made specifically to indulge in these issues really misses the mark.

I haven’t seen the movie. If I do, I’ll blog my own view.

Recording artist Snoop Dogg attends a press conference to promote the P. Diddy and Snoop Dogg European Tour, held at the Kamp Hotel on March 9, 2007 in Helsinki, Finland. (Photo by Dave Hogan/Getty Images)

A reader sends in a brilliant email:

What makes the whole Libby thing different is that the Republicans did it to themselves. This is not the Democrats going after Nixon. This is not the Republicans going after Clinton.

No. The right hand man of the most powerful Republican Vice President in history was done in by a lot of other Republicans. The John Ashcroft Justice Dept agreed with the CIA request to investigate the Valerie Plame leak. Ashcroft’s Republican assistant, James Comey, appointed one of his own, Patrick Fitzgerald, perhaps the only Republican in Chicago. When Libby lied to Fitzgerald, and in so doing, made Fitzgerald’s leak investigation meaningless, Fitzgerald sought to expand his investigation, probably by going to the same sort of Republican three-judge panel that agreed to expand Kenneth Starr’s investigation some years earlier.

Then, after years of Republican complaints that the press had too much immunity under the First Amendment, Fitzgerald basically had the law completely reinterpreted, and forced a lot of very rich, very well-backed reporters to testify. In fact, the only person who saw, who is likely to see, jail time in this whole enterprise was a reporter for the Republican bete noir, the New York Times.

In the end, a Republican prosecutor got Republican judges to get Democratic reporters to testify against Republican politicians.

That just about gets it right. But, wait, there’s more!

Similarly, just like all the leading players on both sides of the issue in the U.S. attorney firings are Republicans. Most of these U.S. attorneys were appointed by John Ashcroft, a former Republican elected official, with the support of Republican senators and congressmen. Just like a new Republican Secretary of Defense is forcing the generals feet to the fire in the Walter Reed scandal.

But to hear the right-wing media tell it, Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorneys, and Secretary Gates are all bleeding heart liberals trying to bring good conservatives down. But that’s not true. This is just another vast right-wing conspiracy. Only this time, they are purging themselves.

A surge in Iraq and a purge at home. More, please.

That was the word the faggot-guy used to defend Ann Coulter from any social disapproval associated with the word "faggot." A reader explains the provenance of the term:

We don’t really think of it as much of a slur today, but as defined in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which helped popularize it back in the day, it really is. Says one male movie character to another:

"You’re a wuss – part wimp and part pussy"

The misogyny behind it – as behind so much homophobia – is pretty clear.

By the way, a reporter tells of another joke making the rounds at CPAC here. Anti-Mormon and anti-gay. What a wonderful carnival conservatism now is.

With Domenici in deep doo-doo over the U.S. attorneys scandal, the Mountain West looks like it may shift decisively away from Republicans. At least, that’s Ryan Sager’s latest take.

Okay, I can be naive sometimes. But this is news? Under any administration, this would be likely. Under Gonzales? You think? The odds on his resignation soon just went up another notch.

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Rod Dreher suggests (seconded by Mark Shea) that conservatives who think Libby should go free because there was no ‘underlying crime’ are guilty of inconsistency, since they accepted no such excuse in the case of Bill Clinton. I think Dreher is right. But plenty of conservatives have argued for a pardon for Libby without claiming that perjury is no big deal. They argue either that the jury got it wrong, or that it was not allowed to consider all the factors that militated in Libby’s favor. One can consistently regard Clinton’s admitted perjury as an offense while thinking that Libby didn’t commit perjury.

What proportion of pro-pardon conservatives have rested their case on the technical issue, rather than on the point that there was no underlying crime and so a pardon is necessary?