The Dish

Republicans against the surge. Repeat: Republicans against the surge. Doesn’t compute. Doesn’t compute. Over-heating. Over-heating …

"Yet another cry for attention by the Paris Hilton of television news, Anderson Cooper," – Irena Briganti, Fox News Spokeswoman on Anderson’s Cooper’s criticism of Fox News’ hyping an Insight magazine story with no substantiation.

Classy, isn’t she? A reader adds:

Funny that a Fox spokesperson wound insult Paris Hilton, whose stardom is due in large part to "The Simple Life" program that aired on Fox. Nothing like slamming family.

Sam Harris’s latest epistle can be read in full here. The temperature has gone up a notch. I’ll respond later today or tomorrow at the latest. Here’s a flavor of the latest from Sam:

Your brandishing of Vatican II is just silly, and only bolsters my argument. Are you saying that for about 1960 years Christians (including all the popes) were mistaken about the true doctrine of Christianity? Would you have our readers believe that Vatican II represents some kind of epistemological breakthrough? In reality, Vatican II was just damage control. The Catholic Church has been struggling to make the best of a bad situation ever since Galileo-who, as you know, was forced to his knees under threat of torture and obliged to recant his understanding of the earth’s motion and then placed under house arrest until the end of his life. He wasn’t absolved of heresy until 1992 (a few decades after Vatican II), at which point the Church ascribed his genius to God, "who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions." (This might be an appropriate place to vomit.) In any case, I didn’t have to quote Leo XIII for lack of modern material. I could have quoted John Paul II, post-Vatican II. Here he is all his sagacity:

This Revelation is definitive; one can only accept it or reject it. One can accept it, professing belief in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, the Son, of the same substance as the Father and the Holy Spirit, who is Lord and the Giver of life. Or one can reject all of this …

You seem to have taken particular offense at my imputing self-deception and/or dishonesty to the faithful. I make no apologies for this. One of the greatest problems with religion is that it is built, to a remarkable degree, upon lies. Mommy claims to know that Granny went straight to heaven after she died. But Mommy doesn’t actually know this. The truth is that, while Mommy may be rigorously honest on any other subject, in this instance she doesn’t want to distinguish between what she really knows (i.e. what she has good reasons to believe) and 1) what she wants to be true, or 2) what will keep her children from grieving too much in Granny’s absence. She is lying–either to herself or to her children–but we’ve all agreed not talk about it. Rather than teach our children to grieve, we teach them to lie to themselves.

You can call me "intolerant" all you want, but that won’t make unreasonable claims to knowledge sound any more reasonable; it won’t differentiate your claims to religious knowledge from the claims of others which you consider illegitimate; and it won’t constitute an adequate response to anything I have written or am likely to write.

The full text is here, along with the blogalogue so far. Stay tuned.

Silver City, New Mexico, 10 am.

This reader captures it well, I think:

I too share your skepticism with the "surge" and am tired of witnessing almost four years of mis-managed war, so I am hardly sympathetic to Bush or his plan.  However, Jim Webb, while speaking very eloquently and forcefully, contradicted himself by first saying that America would not precipitously withdraw from Iraq, but then later saying we should responsibly redeploy so that American troops would be out of Iraq "in short order".  Maybe it’s me, but one sounds like the other. 

I realize this president has put us in the situation we are in, but in choosing between giving the surge time to work or pulling out of Iraq in short order, I’m choosing the former (reluctantly). One thing Bush did effectively was lay out the consequences of abandoning of Iraq, and I don’t think the Democrats’ position laid out by Webb addresses this reality by advocating a quick withdrawal.

I’ve been talking about the war during this SOTU with CNN’s Iraq correspondent, Michael Ware. He too fears that withdrawal of any kind right now could unleash almighty hell in the region. But he recognizes, as I think we all must, that the current strategy cannot work either. "Plus Up" is a euphemism for hoping for the best. It’s less a strategy than a wish.

At this point, the forces necessary to bring order to Iraq – to "shape the outcome" toward victory, in the president’s words – are probably in the region of several hundred thousand more. Victory, in the president’s terminology, probably requires a draft – or a much more drastic increase in military spending and manpower than is now planned. I think the reason Americans are so negative toward this president is that they intuitively know that he has not provided the resources to win. He still hasn’t. And his administration does not have a scintilla of the skill to manage the situation in their absence. And so we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control. Hence the unease, which the president just did nothing to dispel.

Junk science, apparently.

It was, I think, the most effective Democratic response in the Bush years. He managed to bridge economic populism with military service and pride: a very potent combination. He did so with a sense of responsibility. The message, in short: "Lead us toward responsible redeployment in Iraq – or get out of the way." And he said it with testosterone and authority – more authority than this president now has.

The amazing "God Hates Fags" video has been removed. You can still see it here.

10.02 pm. Brave but not so humble. The subway dude is spreading the love. I’m letting go and giving in. America! Yay!

10.01 pm. Baby Frigging Einstein?

10 pm. The NBA dude is next to the Asian heroine or whoever. There’s around six feet between his head and hers. Best shot of the night.

9.58 pm. I’m looking at the script. The hero section is looming. Oy.

9.55 pm. He wants more recruits for the armed forces. Six years late, he endorses Al Gore’s position in the 2000 election. Still: it’s a good move. Maybe next time, we will go to war with sufficient strength and intelligence to win.

9.52 pm. "Whatever you voted for, you didn’t vote for failure." Damn right. But this president gave us failure. He failed in his task of basic competence and decency in the war. That is why the situation in the "here and now" is so grave. Because of his delinquency and arrogance. The American people are not stupid. And their approval rating simply reflects the reality they see.

9.50 pm. "Chaos is their greatest ally in this struggle." The president is speaking of Islamists, Sunni and Shia. I agree. So why did the U.S. sit back and let chaos spread across Iraq for three years? Why did this president refuse for three years to send sufficent forces to succeed?

9.45 pm. The president forces the Democrats to stay sitting when he urges "victory" in Iraq.

9.40 pm. "The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat." Is this the formulation by which the president tries to frame a Muslim civil war as a single war against the West? Rather than attempting to exploit the differences among Islamist terrorists, the president seems eager to unite them. I can’t say it makes any coherent sense to me.

9.34 pm. "The challenge of global climate change." Could he be any vaguer?

9.32 pm. I like the energy stuff. I have no idea if it’s serious, but I like it – and the connection the president made to national security.

9.29 pm. "Without animosity and without amnesty." Nice one, Matthew.

9.28 pm. Deathly silence greets the words "temporary worker program."

9.20 pm. It takes a Democratic Congress to put fiscal conservatism at the front of this president’s priorities.

9.13 pm. He can’t help himself. He begins with a graceful nod to the first female Speaker; then he wrecks it by talking of the "Democrat Congress". The transcript says "Democratic Congress." No biggie – but it does rub the other side the wrong way.

Who is Fitzgerald really after? Here are some excerpts from the news feeds:

"Vice President Cheney himself directed Scooter Libby to essentially go around protocol and deal with the press and handle press himself … to try to beat back the criticism of administration critic Joe Wilson."

Cheney personally "wrote out for Scooter Libby what Libby should say in a conversation with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper."

"Scooter Libby destroyed a note from Vice President Cheney about their conversations and about how Vice President Cheney wanted the Wilson matter handled."

This may be the moment in the Bush administration when the huge liner splits in two, points upward and goes under for good.

(Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP.)