The Dish

Not my most eloquent moment, I’m afraid, but it seems to have hit a nerve:

Your sentiments today regarding Hillary on the Chris Matthews Show match mine exactly. I’ve actually been considering voting for Hillary over the past few weeks given her hawkish foreign policy positions and her DLC-style fiscally prudent, socially tolerant domestic policy. I would support Rudy and McCain over her given the terror this decade-long GOP voter feels when envisioning complete Democratic control over Washington, but if a charlatan like Mitt Romney or a theocon like Sam Brownback were to win the GOP nomination, Hillary on paper would start to look pretty good.

Then I saw the clip in which she announced her exploratory committee, and you’re absolutely right: the "cooties" came back. In a rush of nostalgic animosity, the visceral distate for Hillary Rodham that I cultivated during the ’90s when coming of age politically as a libertarian-style conservative returned. If anyone could "get the band back together" on the right for just one more election, it’s her. She’d be the greatest gift the Dems could give to a collapsing GOP.

"I personally might believe (believe!) that many religious beliefs are irrational and verge on lunacy — but I can both see their efficacy — their attraction and usefulness — and sense their beauty. One does not have to be a Catholic to stand in awe of the Sistine Chapel ceiling; be Muslim to hear the lure of the soulful cry of the muezzin and sense the power of the mass dance of the faithful in prayer; be Hindu or Jewish to read and enjoy a text that is often chock full of amazing and surprising metaphors and analogies. These dances, music, images, metaphors are, I sense, deep-rooted — they are like the neural propensities for grammatical structures that Chomsky goes on about — and are therefore similarly genetically inheritable. The dance that is religion has evolved within us, to be released and expressed in a thousand different forms, none of which make logical sense, and all of which, if looked at literally, require a large helping of denial. God is in the wiring, bequeathed by the genes," – David Byrne, on his blog.

(Painting: detail from a Boticelli fresco in the Sistine Chapel.)

Norm Geras responds to Leszek Kolakowski.

I find myself in email conversations with various readers, attempting to explain why I remain a skeptic about the ability of even the most gifted general to turn around an already far-gone sectarian civil war in Iraq. My pessimism is greeted by the argument that we have to plow on anyway – or give in to terrorists. But this begs a further question: which terrorists? The Shiites? Or the Sunnis? Al Qaeda or Iranian-backed death squads? The metric is no longer Iraq versus terror; it’s Shia terror versus Sunni terror versus al Qaeda terror. In those circumstances, the most relevant question to ask anyone supporting Plus Up is simply: who do you want to win? Since we are engaged in a civil war, and since wars are designed to defeat one side, which side are we trying to defeat? The first question in wartime is: whose side are you on? The fact that no one can currently answer that question is the best reason to cut our losses.

Was a new politics glimpsed last Tuesday night? Here’s my take on its potency.

(Portrait of Jim Webb by Richard Whitney.)

An entertaining take by John Dean.

A Bush innovation: it’s like a think-tank, but without the doubt.

While U.S. forces help the Shiite government weed out Sunni insurgents from Baghdad, the Shiite militias withdraw to bide their time. Where are they going? Iran, of course. When will they return? When Maliki gives them the signal. And who can blame them? They’ll give Bush enough time to claim credit for tamping down violence in Baghdad, let him use that as a face-saver for withdrawal or redeployment, and then invite Moqtada back in to clean up. Simple and obvious, no? Or am I missing something?

London’s Daily Telegraph on Putin’s Russia.

Look, mom: all hands!