The Dish

One reader fisks another:

Do married men (fathers) go on demonstratively bragging?

Better question: do you have any friends at all? Straight men, married or single, fathers or otherwise, boast about their sexual ventures all the time. That is what we do. We brag, everywhere, in poker games and bars, overtly or through innuendo, for as long as we still draw breath. Duh.

Alva is saying that even if one’s lifestyle is degraded and perverted?

Alva is not saying anything of the sort. That is what you are saying. And most people – at least in the next generation – think you are full of it.

This is fake subterfuge and bluff.

You nailed it, Sherlock. You caught on to Eric Alva and his sinister, life-long plan. You see, ever since he knew he was gay, Alva has been trying to concoct a scheme to turn America into the Sodom and Gomorrah of his craving. And then, one night, while prancing around in all his gayness, he saw a commercial for the Army. He knew instantly what he had to do. He would join the Army, and use the social status to advance the cause of moral debauchery. Then Bush decided to go to war, unwittingly giving him the chance to execute his diabolical plan. There, in the sands of Iraq, he saw a protruding land mine, and he willingly jumped on top of it, becoming a martyr for gays everywhere. And to think he would have gotten away with it, too, were it not for your steadfast vigilance!

Look what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah. The biggest strength any army has is its spirit. A joyous, unified, spirit to win, knowing they’re doing the right, just and moral thing.

You’re right, actually. The best asset of the army is its spirit – of comradeship, brotherhood, and unity. It is a spirit which overrules, or at least ought to overrule, all the taxonomies of civilian life: race, politics, class, region, and even, one might hope, sexuality. But if you actually believe our men and women in uniform can stand up to the most maniacal, barbaric, ruthless, and vile killers in the world, and still be flustered by – gasp – a gay person,  then you have officially exiled yourself from the frontier of reason.

It’s a movie that was made, shown and is now utterly lost. There are more of those than you’d imagine, though probably not as many as you’d like. Here’s the synopsis of its history:

The title character of this gay porn flick is none other than the Man from Galilee, whose interest in hanging out with the all-male disciples is supposedly more than mere fraternalism. Parallel to this is a contemporary story of a young gay male who finds new spiritualism by plumbing the gayer aspects of the Gospels for his own notion of loving thy neighbor (particularly if he’s a good looking hunky neighbor).

WHY IS IT LOST? The film would have probably been forgotten had it not been detailed in the 1980 book ‘The Golden Turkey Awards’ by the Medved Brothers. Despite an Internet debate that insists the film never existed, poster art from the movie’s original New York run has turned up to verify it did exist. The film itself, however, is believed to be lost (how the Medveds learned of the film is not clear, though the idea of Michael Medved watching gay porno for "research" is mind-boggling).

Not actually mind-boggling. Policing the culture can be cold and lonely work and someone’s got to do it.

[Update: Here’s an interesting summary of the debate about whether this movie ever existed or whether Michael Medved just made it up. Here’s an open question to Michael Medved. Was this your hoax? Can you tell us now? Did you watch this movie? Or did you make it up?]

A mobile sperm bank is spotted in Oxford. Or is it Cambridge? If it’s finals time, there should be plenty surplus material.

It’s growing. Intel Dump’s Phillip Carter gets mad. And madder. If my military readers are any indication, this is a huge story, and rightly so. Where is McCain? He should have announced his candidacy at Walter Reed, not Letterman.

He flew to Pakistan "in the belly of The Spirit of Strom Thurmond." I bet he did. (Hat tip: Moderate Voice.)

It’s a classic gambit: forcing Huffington to disown leftist commenters on her site. But she has, hasn’t she? She wrote of the comments:

[T]hey are unacceptable and were treated as such by being removed.

I think some Huffposters’ desire to see the vice-president assassinated is repulsive on every level, and indicative of real sickness on the far left. But I would be more impressed if I had ever heard Bill Kristol ever take on the extremists that dominate his side of the aisle. Has Kristol ever said that he finds Ann Coulter’s books to be disgusting? Has he ever disowned his Fox News colleage Sean Hannity’s equation of liberalism and terrorism in the subtitle of a recent book? Did he offer a squeak of opposition to a book titled "Party of Death," clearly referring to the Democrats? Did he dress down the more extreme anti-Clinton elements in the 1990s? Not that I recall. Maybe I have missed his criticisms of fellow "conservatives". If I have, I’ll gladly post them. But for a man who has made a career appeasing and coopting extremists on the far right, he is in a pretty elaborate glass house with respect to Arianna.

Yeah, he’s covering his own ass as well, but this is refreshing in our current climate of rabid partisanship:

"As somebody who had the same phrase in a speech, I think nobody would question Senator McCain’s dedication to our veterans. We have a duty to make sure that we are honoring their sacrifice by giving them missions in which they can succeed … I’m positive that was the intent in which he meant it. It was the same intent I had when I made my statement."

Ralf Schumacher of Germany and Toyota watches from the pits during Formula One testing at the Bahrain International Circuit on February 28, 2007, in Sakhir, Bahrain (Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

The Weekly Standard decides to do its own regularly updated analysis of the Iraq war, to counter-act the accurate but sometimes misleading news reports of the various bombings, murders and kidnappings that are plaguing the country. My view is: the more we know the better. We need to know about the civil war; but we also need to know more about what Petraeus is trying, aganst all the odds, to accomplish. Sometimes you need a military expert to help. The author does not appear to me to be a shill for anyone. According to the Daily Standard,

Kimberly Kagan is a military historian who has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Yale University, Georgetown University, and American University. She is a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, where she teaches the History of Military Operations;an affiliate of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University; and a visiting fellow at Yale International Security Studies.

Money quote:

This report describes in detail and evaluates significant combat on Haifa Street in Baghdad, and clear-and-control operations south of Baqubah in Diyala province, placing these operations within the overall strategic context of the struggle. It discusses coalition efforts to disrupt al Qaeda networks in Iraq, the probable effects of those efforts, and the integral relationship between those efforts and efforts to stem sectarian violence. This report also briefly addresses the evidence for at least tacit Iranian support for Sunni insurgents in Diyala.

It’s downloadable as well.

Where is the videotape of Jose Padilla’s final interrogation? It’s crucial evidence, and could be central to showing the American public in graphic terms what the Bush administration has done to a U.S. citizen. Sometimes you need to see what torture is, as in Abu Ghraib, before you grasp what it is that these thugs in the Bush administration have been up to. And yet … the video has somehow just "disappeared." Money quote:

The missing DVD dates from March 2, 2004. It contains a video of the last interrogation session of Padilla, then a declared ‘enemy combatant’ under an order from President Bush, while he was being held in military custody at a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. But in recent days, in the course of an unusual court hearing about Padilla’s mental condition, a government lawyer disclosed to a surprised courtroom that the Defense Intelligence Agency — which had custody of the evidence — was no longer able to locate the DVD. As a result, it was not included in a packet of classified DVDs that was recently turned over to defense lawyers under orders from Judge Cooke.

The disclosure that the Pentagon had lost a potentially important piece of evidence in one of the U.S. government’s highest-profile terrorism cases was met with claims of incredulity by some defense lawyers and human-rights groups monitoring the case. "This is the kind of thing you hear when you’re litigating cases in Egypt or Morocco or Karachi," said John Sifton, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch, one of a number of groups that has criticized the U.S. government’s treatment of Padilla. "It is simply not credible that they would have lost this tape. The administration has shown repeatedly they are more interested in covering up abuses than getting to the bottom of whether people were abused."

Given what we have discovered about the criminal conduct of the Bush administration with respect to detainees, the notion of "losing" such critical evidence isn’t, to my mind, credible. We cannot prove this, of course. But put it all together and you have two alternatives: a) the Pentagon is so disorganized and incompetent it can lose a critical piece of evidence in its most high-profile case or b) we have a government run by war-criminals covering their tracks. Feel safer?