The Dish

A TPM reader gives some perspective on the war criminal we have as president:

I served in the Air Force from 1982 to 1988. I was an airborne linguist and, as such, was required to go through survival school at Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane. This was a school that officers and enlisted men alike were required to attend…anyone who might end up in a hostile situation or behind enemy lines–or a POW. That was in January of 1984. Part of survival school was training in interrogation resistance and how to handle oneself in the event of capture by enemy forces.

What does that have to do with Meese’s remarks, you might ask? Simply this: Our trainers were careful to instruct us on the Geneva Conventions and which interrogation techniques were covered and which were illegal. I have a very clear memory of what they said about waterboarding. As I recall, water boarding was classified as torture and was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. They told us about the technique for the simple reason that the North Vietnamese used it on American Forces. They wanted us to know about that technique in case we were ever captured by "scumbags who didn’t respect the Geneva Conventions." There were no demonstrations; it was considered too traumatic.

I’m not making this up. The military trainers at our Survival School had nothing but contempt for techniques like this, and we were taught that they were international criminal offenses… And every last one of us who has completed this training knows that waterboarding is torture, pure and simple.

Not under Bush it isn’t.

The new HHS appointee for family planning authored this (PDF) power-point on how too much sex causes brain damage. He believes that even married couples should not use contraception. If you want to know where theo-conservatism goes next, the war on contraception is clearly a major priority; and Keroack is the kind of guy the Christianists want controlling your sex life.

A reader comments:

OK, in hindsight it’s dreadful: a bunch of suburban kids lip-syncing high-pitched hair metal w/o make make-up and garish bouffants. But you know what, by the standards of the genre, and the age of the band, they were pretty good. The production quality, while also cheesy looking back, was good as well.

He clearly was a damn interesting guy. And anyone w/ the courage to wail like that on camera would obviously have no fear when it comes to putting the smack down on some terrorists in a time of need.

Yep. Bingham for me represents not just an openly gay hero. But the kind of hero modern America still serves up: culturally open, tolerant, fun, at ease with modern life, and yet also quite prepared to fight to the death in defense of Western freedom. He represents a lot that the curent right-wing doesn’t seem to understand: just because blue and purple America loves modernity doesn’t mean it is somehow decadent, unpatriotic or too weak to resist Islamist murderers. 9/11 showed that all of America, apart from its far left fringe, was prepared to fight. That legacy of unity, so bitterly squandered by Karl Rove, can and must be summoned up again. But not by this president; and not yet by his party.

(Photo of Mark Bingham, far right, and his Steelers rugby team-mates.)

America isn’t his only victim. Sacha Baron-Cohen went back to his alma mater, Cambridge University in England, as Borat. Enjoy another country being ridiculed:

"One might reasonably argue that a very good way to protect marriage is to remain faithful to one’s spouse, but in politics that sort of behavior won’t raise money for the interest groups or votes for the Republicans. In this case, "family values" wasn’t about Sherwood’s personal example, but his record of keeping homosexuals from marrying. Wouldn’t it do more for the family to strengthen heterosexual marriage before telling others how to live their lives? Why have we seen so many politicians (and some clergy) who talk about "family values" turn out to be the worst practitioners of them?

With a change in focus, more people might want to hear why conservative Christians are faithful and, having heard, perhaps embrace that faithfulness. The culture might then reflect real "family values" from the bottom up, possibly even touching politicians in Washington," – Cal Thomas, getting it right.

Thomas has long warned, by the way, of politicizing faith and morals. This isn’t a new position of his. Check out his book of a while back. But it’s great to see some conservative voices restating a conservative case: Christianity is best expressed by personal example, not political agendas. And a Christianity that becomes indistinguishable from partisan politics has lost its soul.

"Why would [Rick] Warren marry the moral equivalency of his pulpit – a sacred place of honor in evangelical tradition – to the inhumane, sick, and sinister evil that [Barack] Obama has worked for as a legislator?

According to press reports, it is because of a mutual respect that each feels towards the other over the AIDS/HIV pandemic on the African continent. That rationale however is not only dishonest, but not even logical given the two distinct positions that the men come to on the matter. Because of this supposed shared concern, Warren is ready to turn over the spiritual mantle to a man who represents the views of Satan at worst or progressive anti-God liberals at best in most of his public positions on the greatest moral tests of our time," – Kevin McCullough on Townhall.com, whose executive editor is Hugh Hewitt.

Check out his ads.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 3 pm.

Several readers have argued I have misunderstood Charles Krauthammer’s recent column. Here’s a succinct summary of the main critique:

I do not believe Krauthammer is attempting to re-write history or that he is even trying to sway discussion. His comments are about objectives, not reasons.  I see it as the difference between goals and motivations. They are intrinsically linked, but not the same thing. Would you not agree that the reason we invaded Iraq was the belief that Saddam had WMD’s while the objective was, as Krauthammer states, to "depose Saddam Hussein and replace his murderous regime with a self-sustaining, democratic government"?

Another reader makes a similar distinction between "rationales" and "objectives." I wrote that this might just be an oversight by Charles, but I don’t buy these readers’ argument for a second.

Take them on their own terms: let’s say "disarming Saddam" was a "reason" but not an "objective" of the war. It would surely follow nonetheless that if the rationale was a real, rather than invented, one, it would necessitate that a main objective of the invasion would be to find and secure those WMD sites as quickly as possible. In the weeks before Saddam could be deposed, surely these sites and weapons posed a serious risk. So securing them would have to be an "objective" of the war. At the very least, an objective would be to prevent the looting of such sites. And yet, as Woodward’s book reveals, and as many other sources now confirm, there was no serious plan for this, and many such sites were indeed looted while the coalition looked on and did nothing.

The objective evidence makes it more plausible now that the WMD argument was not sincerely held by the people planning the military invasion. Or if it was sincerely believed, the incompetence in execution was beyond belief. I say this reluctantly, and it’s not something I orginally even considered, let alone believed. But the empirical evidence for the unseriousness of the attempt to find WMDs in the invasion period is overwhelming. And that is why I wonder if Charles is guilty merely of a Freudian slip. Did he never believe the WMD argument either? Was it all a ruse for something else? Was it a "rationale" in the sense that it was not a real reason?

Here’s one of a kind: a bunch of Los Gatos High School students, c. 1989, making their own video for their own band. What makes it different is the lead singer. It’s Mark Bingham, the 9/11 hero, who helped bring down United Flight 93, and save Washington DC from another catastrophe. One of his bandmates sent it to me. And yes, it appears they are lipsyncing to "Revolution Calling" by Queensryche. Let’s just say: I’m glad Mark lost the mullet.