The Dish

Judging by the leading candidates for president, it’s the GOP:

Newt Gingrich married his first wife Jackie when he was 19. She was loyal, faithful and helped put him through graduate school. He still dumped her later on and had the class to file for divorce while she was in hospital recovering from cancer surgery. LH Carter, his former campaign treasurer, recalls Gingrich saying of Jackie: "She’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the president. And besides, she has cancer." He refused to pay alimony or child support.

His second marriage lasted almost two decades, but it broke up while he was having an affair with a staffer 23 years younger than him, to whom he is now married. He was having the affair while coordinating impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. He recently confessed to James Dobson, a leader of the religious right, that: "There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong. But I was still doing them … I look back on those as periods of weakness and periods that I’m … not proud of."

I’m not judging any of these men. We are all human and we all fall short of our own standards. But the sharp discrepancy between the party of ‘family values’ and the actual messy, complicated lives that many leading Republicans have led makes for some unmissable ironies.

(Photo of Newt Gingrich by Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

Some not-so-regular readers may have missed my latest epistle in the ongoing blogalogue between me and Sam Harris on faith, reason, truth and lies. If you’re interested, you can find it here.

David Brooks explains (TimesDelete):

There is a certain kind of practical wisdom that is not taught but is imparted through experience. It consists of a sensitivity to the contours of how a situation may evolve, which cannot be put into words.

He really has read Oakeshott, hasn’t he?

Dan Savage explains, in his inimitable way.

North Andover, Massachusetts, 8.30 am.

Gerard Baker pens a highly enjoyable rant:

You really do have to leave the country to appreciate fully how pernicious the BBC’s grasp of the nation’s cultural and political soul has become. The groupthink and assumptions implicit in almost everything broadcast by BBC News, and even less explicitly by much else of the corporation’s output, lie like a suffocating blanket over the national consciousness.

This is the mindset that sees the effortless superiority, at every turn, of benign collectivism over selfish individualism, exploited worker over unscrupulous capitalist, enlightened European over brutish American, thoughtful atheist over dumb believer, persecuted Arab over callous Israeli; and that believes the West is the perpetrator of just about every ill that has ever befallen the world — from colonialism to global warming.

Whenever I go home, I’m struck by the same stuff. But Britain endures, its people immune to these things for the most part. My dad does anyway. For him, the BBC is mainly sports and some good drama. There are more Brits like him than you might think.

A reader writes:

I was a friend of his through high school and college and stayed in touch with him until before he left for overseas. I had many discussions with him about what motivated people and about the nature of evil and power. I have no doubt that the reason he refused sedation is that he did not want to make it easier, in the least, on the killers’ consciences. So he was willing to go through hell fully conscious as the price.

If only his murderers had consciences unalloyed by religious fundamentalism. We must remember that they beheaded him for the sake of their God. This was a religious execution.

(Photo: AFP/Getty from January 2002.)

In front of our noses:

"Here you have a guy — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — who has confessed to planning and directing the worst mass murder ever perpetrated on American soil and has admitted to personally murdering a U.S. citizen in what any reasonably aggressive American prosecutor would call a hate crime, and virtually nobody in the news media has called for putting the man on trial. Worse, virtually nobody has bothered to explain that the willfully erroneous way in which this administration has chosen to deal with the Al Qaeda prisoners from the outset has made it impossible to subject them to anything resembling the normative justice they so richly deserve.

Mohammed can’t be brought to trial because the White House had him tortured and, therefore, virtually none of what you read this week could be used against him in a legitimate court of law …"

And Osama is still at large, building a new base in Pakistan from which to kill more of us.

Chris Crain, former editor of the Washington Blade, has some things to say about HRC’s extremely thin skin when it comes to basic questions of accountability, transparency and bipartisanship. The Blade under Crain was among the first to bust HRC’s numbers scam on its actual "membership" a few years ago. Meanwhile, the Blade itself has a new article on the group’s $26.4 million building and the cool $160,000 they paid last year to an executive director who quit in 2004. HRC coughed up the actual numbers after this blog raised questions. Money quote:

City records show that the purchase price for the building itself in April 2002 was $9.8 million. Rienfierd said HRC financed the purchase and renovation costs through a $22 million bridge loan from a local bank at an interest rate of 1.4 percent plus the monthly adjusted London Interbank Offered Rate, known as LIBOR. The Wall Street Journal listed that rate at 5.32 percent as of last week, bringing HRC’s mortgage interest to about 6.72 percent for this month. Rienfierd said the rate has been considerably lower during the past three years.

But if they’d invested that money in something else instead (like, er, fighting for gay rights) and paid rent? Who knows? A civil rights organization that has very, very few legislative or organizational achievements at a critical time in the battle for gay equality should not, in my view, be splurging $26 million on a plush new building. It’s waste like that that puts smiles on the faces of the religious right – not scrutiny from the blogosphere.

One last word for a while: HRC has said it plans to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and a hate crimes law in this Congressional session. They are not pressing for immigration reform or military service (gay soldiers can wait until Hillary decides it’s safe to support them). So let’s give them a chance to show what they can do with all those millions of gay people’s money. Meanwhile, I’ll keep keeping them honest. We’ve already gotten more info out of them than they have offered in quite a while. Maybe we might even prod them to pass some pro-gay legislation. You never know.

Gonzales has replaced Kyle Sampson with one Chuck Rosenberg, from the Eastern District of Virginia. One important thing to remember here: this district has been the point of reference for all all cases of torture, assault and homicide involving contractors, including contract soldiers, in the war on terror. Despite many fully investigated cases, the district has done nothing. I’ve learned a few things about this administration; and one is that it has done all it can both to prevent exposure of its torture policies, to ensure that no serious criminal cases are brought exposing it, and to grant legal impunity for the key civilian implementers of the torture policy.