The Dish

Michael Fullilove has finally discovered the real secret behind the Bush administration’s Iraq war strategy: an episode of Seinfeld.

Much ink has been split over what torture means. It isn’t the first time. The original White House memo outlining the boundaries drew the line at death or failure of a major bodily organ. Hey: it’s compassionate conservatism. But the exquisite ways in which human beings have found to describe torture that isn’t torture or to call it something else or to place limits on it go back a very long way:

I don’t know how much of your latin remains from your schooldays, but I just reread Ad Extirpanda (To Be Exterminated), the papal bull in which Innocent IV, feeling the Inquisition was not efficient enough in digging out heresy, introduced the occasional use of torture in extreme circumstances. At first, it was truly used this way. Within a few decades however, it had become the norm as legal strategy gave way to blunt force in the name of moral authority.

I found the terms used to explain what kind of torture was to be permitted to bee strangely familiar (translation mine):

"Extraordinary use of the question shall be limited to that which does not involve the effusion of blood or permanent mutilation."

John Yoo, meet your mentor.

I linked to stories last February about the beating of an elderly gay man in Detroit that allegedly led to his death. It was reported as a hate-crime. The story now turns out to be much cloudier and probably not a hate-crime at all. Here’s the latest story with the coroner’s report. After the Matthew Shepard case, which was a vicious crime also distorted in the media (and milked for money by HRC), I should have been more wary.

"To hear some of my colleagues say that we should dispense with this frivolous debate because the president has threatened to veto, what a waste of our time — well, if you logically follow that through, Mr. President, why do we need a Congress? . . . Mr. President, we tried a monarchy once. It’s not suited to America," – Senator Chuck Hagel, Wednesday.

My fiance will kill me, but I urge everyone to vote for Sanjaya in American Idol. It’s very, very important to subvert this compulsive but far too self-important show. Help can be found here. if the whole blogosphere got behind him, he might even win. Which would be fantastic.

This is the first of what one imagines will be a series of stories about Rudy Giuliani’s record in New York City. He knew about Bernard Kerik’s connection to a company linked to organized crime before appointing him police commissioner. Money quote:

Rudolph W. Giuliani told a grand jury that his former chief investigator remembered having briefed him on some aspects of Bernard B. Kerik’s relationship with a company suspected of ties to organized crime before Mr. Kerik’s appointment as New York City police commissioner, according to court records.

Mr. Giuliani, testifying last year under oath before a Bronx grand jury investigating Mr. Kerik, said he had no memory of the briefing, but he did not dispute that it had taken place, according to a transcript of his testimony.

This was the man Rudy pushed to run DHS. We also learn today that Rudy wants his third wife in his cabinet meetings if he were president. Who elected her? In Rudy’s world, he does all the electing.

What a joy to watch.

Who is Tim Griffin, the man Karl Rove inserted as the new U.S. Attorney for Arkansas, bouncing Bud Cummins? Just one of the most accomplished opposition researchers in the Rove machine – as Josh Green reported in this 2004 piece in the Atlantic. Why was he put in place by a provision slipped secretly into the Patriot Act to avoid Senate scrutiny? Isn’t it obvious by now? His job was not to prosecute crime, but to prosecute, slime and obliterate the opposition party. Josh Marshall explains it in this video:

Gonzales, in my view, is not the real culprit here. He is now and always has been a tool. It’s Rove the Senate needs to investigate, and Rove who needs to provide the answers.

Hey, it’s the blogosphere. The substantive challenge of the fisk is to force me to delineate exactly where I would draw the line between what government should and shouldn’t do. I have.

He’s opposed to same-sex marriage but also in favor of a federalist solution. I think the GOP’s best bet on this question is the exact formula McCain has laid out. I can live within a coalition with people who oppose my right to marry the man I love. But I cannot live within a coalition that would amend the federal constitution to forbid it for ever in every state.