The Dish

No, that’s not a misprint.

Matt Stoller trumpets his own movement in this piece at TPM, and he has harsh words for the online right:

The right-wing blogs don’t organize, don’t innovate, and reflect the larger structure that was put into place over the last thirty years by right-wing organizers who made their bones in the 1970s. As a result, there is no right-wing Moveon, no right-wing Actblue, or Free Culture movement. They have no new ideas, whereas our ideas are expanding into social systems that generate new streams of revenue, information, or just get lots of organizers to a bar to drink and network.

The reduction of political conversation and discourse to the demands of political power and activist organization is inevitable. But don’t blame me if I stand aside.

USA Today adds its voice to the chorus decrying the appalling comments of Charles "Cully" Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. Money quote:

Since its opening in 2002, the Guantanamo Bay prison camp has become a symbol of un-America behavior, fueling cries for its closure, including from close ally Britain. Reports from the United Nations and others allege treatment tantamount to torture at the prison camp.

If the department’s point man on detainees thinks the best use of his time and pulpit is stirring up resentment for detainee lawyers, he has a seriously skewed view of reality. America has huge problems at Guantanamo Bay. The presence of pro bono lawyers trying to ensure justice for detainees is not one of them.

He should be fired, if the deep damage that this administration has already done to the rule of law in America is not to be compounded.

If you want an exhibit in how today’s "conservatives" can say black is white with a straight face, read this.

The entire "I have a dream" speech on YouTube. Where else?

A reader responds to the war-poem published earlier today:

You ask of your wrenching poem, "Does it make sense to you? Do you understand?"

No, it doesn’t, and I don’t, and I can’t.

I’m safely at home, working and raising my daughter and watching football – and though I’ve read accounts of what is happening in this sham of a war, and have heard stories of the sacrifices of men and women who are fighting on, as hard as they can, despite the stupidity of their civilian leadership, I can never know what it is like to see a friend die in a flash, never know what it’s like to have to decide whether to help that man on the side of the road or kill him before he kills you, to drive over children because the alternative is to keep your friends out in the open to be slaughtered.

I can’t know what you know, and I will never know what you know, and I’m sorry for that. I wish you could stay home, marry your girlfriend, raise a family, and watch football, and never think of this war again. I don’t know what can be done, but I do know that I’ll do the pitifully small amount I can, shouting as loudly as I can that this war has failed, and that we do our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines no service by sending in a handful more to save face. I’ll do that, knowing full well that in the end, it will not be enough; I only hope someday that you can forgive your fellow Americans for demanding sacrifice of you beyond what we were willing to give, trading your very safety for the illusion of safety for us.

I hope you can forgive us, but I understand if you cannot.

A reader writes:

I’m in the Marine Corps. I just returned home from seven months in Anbar Province. I’m deploying again in April. There’s a girl I want to marry, but I can’t. Out of 18 months, I will have spent a mere 6 at home. I can’t marry her, because I’m never here. She’ll probably leave me because of this surge, and it’s not her fault.

I’m not unique. What I mean to say is this – the nation at large has no idea what we’re going through. I go surfing in the mornings, and I see all these teenagers with shrapnel scars and grim faces. We’re all damaged.

So I wrote a poem this morning. Because I’m angry and I want it to be real to people who argue about it but have no idea what it’s all about. Read this. Does it make sense to you? Do you understand?

Fucker

They heard it twice; bombs do that when they crack
across the dunes, a groan chasing a clap
In the desert, where blue eyed boys in armor
listen, pink faced, to the wind and know
It’s the sound of someone dying when they
see the truck all mangled on the roadside
The thin man all blown to pieces inside
and, for a heartbeat, feel, because maybe
He was just an old man, driving home but
they see the next bomb with him meant for some
Pot-hole, dead goat, trash pile, old car, young man –
deadly, they know, like their dead friends, and now
They don’t shrink from saying to him, "Fucker,"
they say, "The first rule is, fucker, be sure
Where you put the last one, fucker." Laughing
without pity for him who is scattered
Bloody around the boys who die now too
because they aren’t repulsed by the sight of
This thing, anymore, that they’ll take home, thinking
of the day when they scolded a corpse

I read you everyday, Andrew. Thanks.

(Photo: Hadim Izban/AP.)

"I am sure that most of you have read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving, entitled ‘Rip Van Winkle.’ The one thing that we usually remember about the story is that Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years. But there is another point … that is almost completely overlooked. It was the sign in the end, from which Rip went up in to the mountain for his long sleep. When Rip Van Winkle went up into the mountain, the sign has a picture of King George III of England. When he came down twenty years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States … The most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that Rip slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution …

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare. Then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place and there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, ‘Behold, I make all things new, former things are passed by’…

"God grant that we will be participants in this newness and this magnificent development. If we will but do it, we will bring about a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace. And that day the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy," – Rev Martin Luther King Jr., sermon delivered on Passion Sunday (Mar. 31, 1968) at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC (from: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.).

Scott Horton meditates on its meaning for today here.

(Photo: National Archives and Records Administration.)

Dahlia Lithwick maintains her admirable and relentless dissection of the terrible abuse of power and the constitution in the Padilla case, one of the most important cases in the history of American liberty. Money quote:

This is why the White House yanked Padilla from the brig to the high court to the federal courts and back to a Florida trial court: They were only forum shopping for the best place to enshrine the right to detain him indefinitely. Their claims about Padilla’s dirty bomb, known to be false, were a means of advancing their larger claims about executive power. And when confronted with the possibility of losing on those claims, they yanked him back to the criminal courts as a way to avoid losing powers they’d already won.

The right to detain him indefinitely. It’s as good a definition of creeping tyranny as any we have.

"In the American Conservative piece I wanted to offer some resistance to the assumption of conservative religious unanimity. I tried to point out that conservatism has no necessary relation to religious belief, and that rational thought, not revelation, is all that is required to arrive at the fundamental conservative principles of personal responsibility and the rule of law. I find it depressing that every organ of conservative opinion reflexively cheers on creationism and intelligent design, while delivering snide pot shots at the Enlightenment. Which of the astounding fruits of empiricism would these Enlightenment-bashers dispense with: the conquest of cholera and other infectious diseases, emergency room medicine, jet travel, or the internet, to name just a handful of the millions of human triumphs that we take for granted?" – Heather Mac Donald, part of the conservative solution, rather than part of the conservative problem.