The Dish

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?

More and more newspapers are dropping Coulter’s columns. And the chairman of the syndicate that publishes her hate-speech has agreed to consider answering emailed questions about his continued support for the Faggot-Woman.

Rush Limbaugh joins the throng.

I keep getting emails asking me where it is. It’s in the archives now. But here’s the link. If any newspaper wants to reprint it, as some now have, feel free. No charge. Just cite the blog.

"Bush took the blame for Abu Ghraib, but who believes that he desired torture and obscene handling of the enemy?" – Bill Buckley.

Where to start? First, I don’t recall Bush personally taking the blame for Abu Ghraib at all. He even refused to let his defense secretary take the blame and resign. I remember him insisting that "this is not America" and denying that he had any role in it, despite signing a memo that allowed all such abuse if "military necessity" demanded it.

Bush’s signature is on the memo. Period. He is in charge of his mental faculties and he is commander-in-chief. Period. His own defense secretary sent Geoffrey Miller to Abu Ghraib to replicate the torture Bush had already ordered at Gitmo. Torture continued long after Abu Ghraib was exposed under Bush as commander-in-chief. Given a chance to ban it entirely last year, Bush did all he could to keep torture alive as a program, succeeded, and then planned on running a campaign boasting of his aggressive treatment of military detainees. He has done everything to push the actual blame for torture on military grunts, rather than on the civilians who authorized and directed them. In fact, he got the GOP to pass a law retroactively immunizing him from legal culpability for torture in the last days of the last Congress. If he is prepared to do all this, then, sorry, Mr. Buckley, but you need to wake up.

If Bush is willing to take responsibility for toppling Saddam – and to dress up in military uniform and land on an aircraft carrier for good measure – then he must take full responsibility for torture and for the appalling treatment of injured vets at home. He cannot have it both ways. Either he is commander-in-chief or he isn’t. You don’t get to be commander-in-chief for all the good times; and have someone else take the responsibility for the bad ones. Your daddy isn’t going to let you off the hook, any more Dubya. Get that?

But Buckley asks a deeper, more interesting question. Bush authorized and endorsed torture. That much is indisputable. But did he actually fully realize what he was doing? He is certainly shallow enough to authorize torture and not fully grapple with what that means. The man is a master in denial. And he is deeply, deeply morally lazy. This is a guy who could laugh and mock a woman he was about to execute. Remember that? He makes his cut-throat mother look compassionate.

Did he wrestle long and hard with the question and decide that allowing torture was a terrible thing but he had no choice to protect American lives? Or did he just say "fine," do what you have to do, and move on? I suspect the latter. Occasionally his glib callowness still has the capacity to shock, even after all these years. His dry-drunk capacity for utter denial of reality – especially about his own moral complicity in torture and the deaths of thousands of innocents in Iraq – renders him immune from taking moral responsibility. For anything.

That’s what fundamentalism can do to a person: it can so convince you that you are on the side of absolute good that you do not even stop to imagine that you are also capable of absolute evil. But Bush has been capable of absolute evil. His glib, lazy hands are covered in the blood of others, and he has tainted the honor of his office and the military more deeply than any president in modern times. But he is saved, isn’t he? And the saved cannot do evil, can they?

(Photo: a detainee tortured and killed at Abu Ghraib under the command of president George W. Bush.)