The Dish

NRO’s Schmittian blogger, Mark Levin, attacks Chester Finn’s article … on NRO. More fights, please. They’re a sign of health.

A reader makes an obvious point:

Yes, but … surely the combination of a fairly (at least comparatively) flaming Pope with the harsh homophobic rhetoric issued over his signature must be not just saddening, but enraging. At least women don‚Äôt have to contend with blatant self-contradiction from Rome‚ÄîRome doesn‚Äôt prop up women in positions of power from which they oppress women, while it seems that many members of the Vatican bureaucracy spend their days condemning homosexuals before heading out to enjoy the delights of the ‚Äúhomosexual culture‚Äù of the city. So, yes, the fabulous pageantry is amusing, and pretty transparent to anyone with a modicum of gay-dar, but it dresses up a vicious and deadly culture of denial in the hierarchical Church. Didn‚Äôt Jesus have something to say about those who impose impossible burdens on others but don’t lift a finger to help?

Though I will attempt to learn from your lead, and at least smile at the show.

My rage continues. But it is humanly impossible, thank God, to feel it for ever. And so I try and make the best of it.   

The game’s on.

People talk about the immorality of the government not funding experimental embryonic stem cell research to cure or treat certain diseases. And yet we already have a drug that requires no elaborate production, has no bad side-effects, that actually cures serious illness and helps the sick – and the federal government doesn’t just not fund this; it bans anyone from using it, and throws sick people in jail for it. This policy is despicable; it’s immoral; and it’s a scandal that marijuana is not available for any sick person it could help. Here’s riveting, intelligent first-person testimony from a medical marijuana user for 35 years. It saved his life. He testified in Michigan yesterday. How dare the government ban this substance?

Chester Finn calls it like it is – in National Review! The times they are a-changing. Money quote:

What’s gone wrong with the GOP? Let me start by quoting a friend who is both gay and conservative (yes, I know several such): “I’m for low taxes, strong defense and limited government. Why doesn’t the Republican party want me?”

There’s a two-part answer to that question and neither half is good news. The first is that today’s GOP doesn’t really want gays — and it yearns to supervise everybody else’s bedroom and reproductive behavior as well as (implicitly, at least) their relationship to God. The second is that Republicans are no longer really in favor of limited government. Besides having their own version of a nanny state, they want to spend and spend, start program after program, ladle out the pork, make deals with influence peddlers, and spin the revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street. Yes, they still pretend to favor low taxes but that’s an illusion; they pay for limitless government via huge deficits that will mean high taxes for my granddaughter.

Equality formally arrived today.

Josh nails it:

We’re now down to the Iraq people or the American people as the primary culprits for George W. Bush’s disaster.

I thought Republican denialism could not survive the last election and the undeniable facts on the ground in Iraq. Wrong. They’re still spinning – into the worst of all worlds.

Now former Russian PM Gaidar, another Putin foe, is sick – possibly from some kind of poison. Polonium again? Has Putin launched a micro-nuclear war against his opposition?

A useful, if scary, primer.

My preference is for a draw-down of troops in Shiite and Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, a redeployment to Kurdistan where they like us and whence we can keep an eye on any egregious terrorist activities in Anbar, and a much bigger force presence in Baghdad to prevent the capital from imploding. If the Shiite militias want to fight it out for control of Southern Iraq, fine. At least then we may have a victor we can actually talk to, instead the mellifluous Maliki. But – surprise! – the Bush administration is likely to do what it has long done: pick the worst of both worlds. We won’t get the advantage of a clean or decisive break from the past, and we won’t send enough troops to Baghdad:

While the White House reviews its strategy options, Pentagon planners are also looking beyond the immediate reinforcements for Baghdad to the question of whether they will need to draw more on reserve units to meet troop requirements in the Iraqi capital, military officials said. In particular, the Army is considering sending about 3,000 combat engineers from reserve units.

The proposal would not increase the overall number of troops in Baghdad, but it is controversial because it would require sending units that had already been deployed to Iraq in recent years, a step National Guard officials have been trying to avoid.

So no real attempt to gain control of Baghdad. Have we even found the captured US soldier yet? Or has he been abandoned for good? Meanwhile, we’ll keep talking pointlessly to the "right guy," Maliki. Why? To save this president’s face. I don’t believe any American soldier’s life is worth sacrificing for one deluded man’s self-esteem, do you?

(Photo: Brooks Kraft/Corbis for Time.)