The Dish

A take on Senator Clinton’s joke – and resilient paranoia.

The president almost didn’t bother.

"They kidnap 10 Sunnis, they get ransom on five, and kill them all, in each big kidnap operation they make at least $50,000, it’s the best business in Baghdad," – a Shia man close to the Mahdi Army, in the Guardian.

Of course, it’s actually quite hopeful to think that the sectarian murders and kidnapping are motivated in part by financial gain. Better than religious zeal – because it can be bought off. But the enmeshment of the police and the militias in Baghdad is now complete. Their interaction with the Iraqi "national" army is routine but not universal. From a Mahdi Army warrior:

"We have specific units that we work with where members of the Mahdi Army are in command. We conduct operations together. We can’t ask any army unit to come with us, we just ask the units that are under the control of our men. The police are all under our control, we ask them to help or inform them that shooting will take place in a street and it involves the Mahdi Army, and that’s it."

(Photo: Mohammed Sawaf/AFP/Getty.)

Ted Haggard’s mega-church follows Jesus’s example.

David Frum breaks with the official line over Maher Arar:

The Arar case should raise some belated red flags over the real value and true purposes of all this Syrian "co-operation."

You think? There’s some conflict between declaring Syria outside the diplomatic pale for negotiations but fine for outsourcing torture? Amazing insights these neocons have.

After his patently unhinged appearance with Wolf Blitzer last week, one wonders how much longer the vice-president’s increasingly bizarre assertions of secrecy and authority will be tolerated in Washington. Check out this post from David Kurtz. Money quote:

The Vice President of the United States refuses to divulge who works in his office. Rozen’s article provides an estimate of 88 persons on the VP’s staff, which I take to mean that the OVP won’t even say how many people are on staff. These are people on the public payroll. Wouldn’t you say the public is entitled to know?

Queens, New York City, 2 pm.

"Don’t take offense personally if I get mad at Congress. It’s important for us to realize we lost, and there are significant reasons that happened, but it isn’t because conservatives were rejected. But it’s because we rejected the conservative philosophy in this country … If the promise of pork and more programs is the way Republicans think they’ll regain the majority, then they’ve got a problem," – Jeb Bush, finally stating the obvious. Maybe he’ll let his brother in on this one of these days, as well.

If the Massachusetts governor only managed this luke-warm review from K-Lo, his speech to the National Review crowd must have gone down like JPod at a Lilith concert. Oh well.

A reader writes:

Whose side am I on? Stephen Colbert had the answer a week or so ago. First, we side with the Shi’ites to wipe out the Sunnis. Then we side with the Kurds to wipe out the Shi’ites. Then we side with the Turks to wipe out the Kurds and we give Iraq to the Amish.

Let’s call it Plan D.