The Dish

I have an office; and interns; and a tech staff. In my orientation today, the techies told me they were in the process of "sucking down" my blog archives. I didn’t ask any more questions after that.

A reader writes:

Carter was a hawk, but he wasn’t a traditional one because realists and other practitioners of realpolitick don‚Äôt sufficiently appreciate the importance of political legitimacy. Playing the ‘freedom’ card, if you will, undermined the raison d’etre of the Soviet Union by stating the simple truth ‚Äì that a system that can only survive through massive applications of violence against its own people is a system destined for the dustbin of history. Human rights was a way to highlight the fear and moral cowardice of the communist dictatorships and so destroy the implicit public support that underpinned and propped up communism in a way that no gun, bomb, or army could ever defend against. The Soviet Union and its empire collapsed not because we pushed it over, but because no one wanted to keep it propped up.

Sure, Carter laid the foundation for the future Reagan military buildup and did things like aiding the Afghan resistance, but the strongest blow ever dealt to Soviet communism was the one that pointed out what an evil, corrupt, and bankrupt system it had become. Stalin once quipped, ‚Äòhow many divisions has the Pope?‚Äô That Stalin’s heirs are now footnotes and Catholicism is alive and well in Poland goes to show just how much Stalin misunderstood the importance of political legitimacy in a contest like the Cold War. Ideas are weapons too, often the most important ones.

That goes for the current war as well. It will be won – or lost – in people’s minds.

"We are living through one of the most transformative periods in history. If we are going to make it, we need a far greater appreciation and respect for others, or we’re going to blow up mankind. Look at what zealotry can do. Religious zealotry has been responsible for killing more people than any other thing. Look at the Middle East today. It’s all about religion. We need to move past those divisions and learn to be tolerant and respectful. If we go out there full of intolerance and hatred, we’ll never make it," РSenator Chuck Hagel, in GQ.

He really does. Though maybe not as much as Donnie Davies below. (Hat tip: Dan.)

This is either horrifying or sublime. I still don’t quite know which. But South Park just got some new material.

More info here.

Not so much.

A salutary quote for these Orwellian times:

"The grammar of Newspeak has two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. …In addition, any word – this again applied in principle to every word in the language – could be negative by adding the affix un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant "warm" while pluscold and doublepluscold meant, respectively, "very cold" and "superlatively cold".

It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ante-, post-, up-, down-, etc. By such methods it was possible to bring about an enormous diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word good, there was no need for such a word as bad, since the required meaning was equally well – indeed better – expressed by ungood. All that was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be replaced by Unlight, or light by undark, according to preference."

When we get to Double Plus Down in Iraq, we’ll know it’s over.

A libertarian has a conniption:

"Is it D’Souza’s argument that if conservative Americans help their traditional Muslims stop homosexuality and condoms, Turkey will then become a better ally of the United States in the war against terror? Much as I’m trying for the sake of argument to entertain the idea, I can’t see how that would happen. More likely, conservatives will look ridiculous, Hillary will be elected president, and certain conservative think tanks will then get more money.

And it will be tougher than hell for bloggers like me to maintain (as I have repeatedly) that there really is a huge difference between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam. Much as I hate to say this, I think Dinesh D’Souza has done more to advance Andrew Sullivan’s thesis of a "Christianist-Islamist alliance" than Sullivan ever could have."

Or maybe such an alliance is the only logical step forward for theo-conservatism.

A look back at Bush’s previous SOTU pledges.

Here’s some more info on the cool graphics tool I linked to earlier. Now get back to work.