Category: The Dish

"Bush too has tried to straddle the liberal-conservative divide, but he has wound up doing for the image of conservatism roughly what the movie ‘Deliverance’ did for the image of Southern hospitality. (I just watched the film again and kept thinking, ‘This is a real Red state!’)" – far right commentator, Joe Sobran.

Just in case this blog isn’t gay enough, a friend emails me the following pearls of wisdom from Hollywood Squares’ Paul Lynde. Hey, there’s a war on, and it helps to laugh now and again:

Q. Do female frogs croak?
A. Paul Lynde: If you hold their little heads under water long enough.

Q. Paul, why do Hell’s Angels wear leather?
A. Paul Lynde: Because chiffon wrinkles too easily.

Q. It is considered in bad taste to discuss two subjects at nudist camps.
One is politics, what is the other?
A. Paul Lynde: Tape measures.

Q. When you pat a dog on its head he will wag his tail. What will a goose do?
A. Paul Lynde: Make him bark?

Q. If you were pregnant for two years, what would you give birth to?
A. Paul Lynde: Whatever it is, it would never be afraid of the dark.

Q. It is the most abused and neglected part of your body, what is it?
A. Paul Lynde: Mine may be abused, but it certainly isn’t neglected.

Q. Who stays pregnant for a longer period of time, your wife or your elephant?
A. Paul Lynde: Who told you about my elephant?

Q. According to Ann Landers, what are two things you should never do in bed?
A. Paul Lynde: Point and laugh.

A welcome nod to constitutional democratic principles by the Bush administration today. The Schmittian conservatives are, naturally, appalled.

The bigotry and hatred being perpetrated by some Saudi-funded radical Muslims in Britain is slowly being exposed by the British media. Here’s a first installment of a documentary from UK’s Channel 4. It’s enlightening and terrifying. These people are religious fascists; and they form a clear and present danger to our freedoms. You can watch the other installments here.

One of the chief mullahs defends himself here.

They’re reaching out to Jews. Are the gays next?

Michelle Malkin writes:

Modern war in the Middle East is no longer as cut-and-dried as shooting all the bad guys and going home. We are fighting a "war of the fleas" – not just Sunni terrorists and Shiite death squads, but multiple home-grown and foreign operators, street gangs, organized crime and freelance jihadis conducting ambushes, extrajudicial killings, sectarian attacks, vehicle bombings and sabotage against American, coalition and Iraqi forces. Cell phones, satellites and the Internet have allowed the fleas to magnify their importance, disseminate insurgent propaganda instantly and weaken political will.

I came to Iraq a darkening pessimist about the war, due in large part to my doubts about the compatibility of Islam and Western-style democracy, but also as a result of the steady, sensational diet of "grim milestone" and "daily IED count" media coverage that aids the insurgency.

I left Iraq with unexpected hope and resolve.

It’s good to see a voice on the far right actually acknowledging that this war cannot be won by sheer force alone. Malkin’s admiration for the troops is clear and shared by all of us. She does not engage in shilling or posturing in this column. She’s actually concerned that we succeed. But when you read her piece, and weigh the evidence of potential success and the evidence of grotesque failure that she provides, you may not come away with as much hope and resolve as she did. I sure didn’t.

The Catholic magazine Commonweal ran a long and scholarly article on the justness of the Iraq war here.

What he said on the radio doesn’t reflect his "core beliefs".

One moral aspect of the Iraq war that seems to me to have been under-estimated is the ultimate, moral responsibility of the United States for the thousands of civilian Iraqis murdered under U.S. occupation. Yes, obviously, the vast majority of these deaths were not at the hands of U.S. forces. Yes, obviously, Iraqis – Sunni and Shia – bear responsibility to some extent. But the laws of warfare – the moral guidelines for just warfare – insist that an invading and occupying army is responsible for the basic security of the population under its care. We broke it; we own it. The violence that has taken so many did not happen immediately. It grew slowly, with forewarning. It took off after the bombing of the Samarra mosque last February. All of it was foretold; and many urged passionately for more troops to maintain order from 2003 onward. The president and his war-criminal of a defense secretary heeded not a word. They sent no more troops. They allowed one of the most brutal civil wars in modern history to gather pace under America’s watch. The blood of 34,000 Iraqi civilians last year therefore finds its way onto the hands of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. By refusing to fight a serious war, to commit enough troops for security, and to adjust as circumstances shifted, they let these innocent people die by the thousands, and they have abandoned those who risked their lives for us to scenes from Hieronymus Bosch.

The damage the conduct of this war has done to America strategically is profound. But to my mind, by far the deepest damage has been to the idea of America, to the decency of America, and its reputation for responsibility in world affairs. From authorizing torture to the acquiescence in mass murder, this president has stained the honor of this country and the West. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said days after the invasion, as the chaos first emerged. Wrong. In a country with a serious government or occupying power, stuff doesn’t happen. And it is a total abdication of morality and responsibility to say it does.

(Photo: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty.)

Here’s a Catholic lawyer’s take on the occupation of Iraq and the execution of Saddam:

[I]n the end, we must live with the reality that our government—acting in our names—managed the execution of Saddam from beginning to end. We invaded. We overthrew the Iraqi government. We dissolved Iraqi institutions. We destabilized the country. We wrote new laws, appointed new judges and prosecutors. We created the legal system that would try him and hear his appeal. We failed to protect Saddam’s defense lawyers—three of whom were assassinated during the trial. We handed Saddam over to a government that we have known to be infiltrated with brutal killers.

My depression and sadness over the execution of Saddam remain. Surely, he was no innocent. But neither are we. We bear responsibility for this latest affront to human dignity.