Category: The Dish

Laura Bush and William Westmoreland: a comparison.

Don’t be so hard on yourself, John Harris.

Olbermann vs Beck vs Olbermann. Do you care? Me neither. But I’m still linking. I bet you click.

Clive Davis celebrates a new show in London. Hip-hop did not invent dirty lyrics, apparently.

Ames, Iowa, 8.40 am.

This is just one of countless stories of soldiers who are currently risking their lives and limbs for our sake:

Staff Sgt. Eric Alva had no specialized skills, but he was a decorated staff sergeant who had served in Somalia and Japan. As troops began to push into Iraq, on March 21, 2003, Alva was leading 11 Marines among 75 or so sailors and Marines in a 50- to 55-vehicle convoy on its way from the desert in Kuwait to Basra, Iraq.

It was a logistical convoy moving through the desert at night, lights out, night-vision goggles on. The sand was so kicked up it was nearly impossible for Alva to even keep track of the vehicle in front of him. At one of three stops along the way, Alva, who hadn’t eaten for a full day, was heating up an MRE when he went to get something out of his Humvee.

"I took maybe a step or two," Alva said, "and that is when the explosion went off." It was a land mine. "I stepped on a land mine with my right foot," Alva said. "The explosion went off and threw me about 10 feet. I was in severe pain."

His hearing was temporarily lost, so he couldn’t hear his own screaming. His hand was covered in blood; the tip of the index finger on his right hand was blown off, and the nerves had been damaged forever. Marines ran to him.

"They lifted my left foot and cut the bootlaces from the bottom, and they lifted my heel, and they took the boot off from the heel," Alva said. "And they never touched the right leg. So I remember even asking the chaplain, ‘What is wrong with my legs? What is wrong with my legs?’ And the chaplain – because we had chaplains with us – and he said, ‘There is nothing wrong. You are fine. You are fine.’" But he wasn’t. Evacuated to Kuwait by helicopter, Alva woke up hours later in the post-op recovery room. His leg was gone.

I don’t think that such a man should be kicked out of the military for being openly gay, do you? Today, Alva will be in Congress asking for the ban on honest homosexual soldiers to be lifted. He’s one of them.

Lift the ban.

Give that woman a cable show, for Pete’s sake.

I’ve lived here for fourteen years, and I’ve lived in the neighborhood for twenty, with a brief break. Saturday afternoon was deadlier than usual, with two people shot and wounded in a drive-by shooting on my block. I was obliviously walking my dogs nearby at the time. Two nights ago, the street was lit up with klieg lights, as in the photo, as the cops tried to deter more violence. At the same time, I only found out about the shooting last night – which tells you something about the nature of urban crime. The atmosphere is certainly much, much better than when I first moved in, when it was crack-war central. And the neighborhood is now crammed with lofts, with a huge supermarket opening on one end of it, old warehouses now converted into yuppie housing, an after-school children’s art center round the corner, and so on. Some of the new violence, I’m guessing, is a function of the gangs finally being pushed out – to conduct their deadly business elsewhere. Last throes, of something like that. Some might be accidental. But it’s certainly not the suburbs where I live. Or somewhere tame and without edge, like Manhattan.

My mother has recently figured out how to read my blog. Now this:

Andrew, May I ask who or what is the "money" frequently shown as "money quote" on your blog? cheers mum xx

Oh dear. And I just got done explaining what GOP stands for.

I’d been told this privately, but it’s now public: Marty Peretz no longer has any ownership of The New Republic. From my dealings with CanWest with respect to this blog, they certainly seem like consummate professionals – which is what TNR badly needs. The new design is very classy (and similar to one I tried and failed to accomplish while I was editor). I have no idea whether Marty’s loss of ownership means a different ideological and political direction for TNR. But Frank Foer says he wants to "take it very distinctly in a different kind of direction." I take that to mean: more liberal and more eclectic. It’s good for the magazine, given its current financial state.

But Marty’s departure is worth noting in its own right. When he took over TNR, it was a moribund vessel for brain-dead Great Society liberalism. He forced it to grapple with new realities, new ideas, new ideologies. He gave many people their first start in journalism: Mike Kinsley, Rick Hertzberg, Leon Wieseltier, Jeffrey Rosen, Jake Weisberg, among them, and found and groomed dozens of other talents, taking risks others wouldn’t, and sending an electrical charge through the magazine’s corridors. Yes, there were many fights and tantrums and dramas. Every good magazine that is intellectually alive should have them. Not every publisher, owner, and editor-in-chief lets them spiral out of control or takes sides in them. That’s what made Marty different, and what made his stewardship of TNR so memorable. He made a lot of enemies, many of them the right ones. He made mistakes. But he also made TNR what it has been: a unique, precious voice of querulous liberalism, worth more in an afternoon than all the hoots and hurrahs of the netroots of the last few years. I’ll always, always, be grateful for the chance he gave me, and for the magazine he truly reinvented.