The Dish

Scott Horton writes a moving, powerful defense of an honorable soldier who did what she had to against the war criminals who run the Pentagon.

A final confirmation that Haggard was still lying yesterday. But what’s interesting to me is that having adulterous gay sex is apparently, in Haggard’s mind, a worse sin than buying crystal meth. He copped to the meth before the sex. A reader commented yesterday:

It’s telling that Rev. Haggard first admission is to purchasing meth. America can tolerate drug stories. We’ve heard them before. We like them even. The popularity of James Frey’s memoir, err, novel, speaks to our affinity for these tales of dissolution and rehabilitation. After all, a user can be redeemed. Not so with a homosexual. What I believe is most horrifying to many Christianists about homosexuality is that it can’t be fixed, or worse, that its practitioners do not even desire to be fixed. Gays are sinners who don’t want redemption.

Recall that Rep. Foley used a similar tactic in the unspooling of his confessions. As I remember it, Foley checked into a substance abuse program just days after the allegations of page abuse surfaced. That strategy: turn pedophilia into a story about alcoholism and Foley’s own childhood abuse. We don’t know how the Haggard story will eventually unfold, but I bet that his handlers will hide the sex behind the smoke of the meth pipe as much as they can.

Wrong, it turns out. The drugs-worse-than sex may be a story that works in the mainstream; but among some Christianists, drug abuse is nowhere near as bad as being gay.

(Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty.)

A reader writes:

David Frum didn’t really argue that a meth-snorting homophobe who for three years cheated on his wife with a male prostitute while at the same time denouncing gay relationships is more moral than an openly gay man, did he?  Oh yes he did.

Kathryn Lopez didn’t really call the piece "excellent," did she? Oh yes she did.

And to think, some people think of the GOP as unhinged or homophobic.

How on earth did anyone get that idea?

Another sane American in a conservative paper draws the same sane conclusion as Jon Rauch:

People in power simply can’t be trusted. If we’re going to have a Republican executive branch, we need a Democratic legislature to hold its feet to the fire. And vice-versa.
So on Tuesday, I’m neither voting Democratic or Republican. I’m voting for the oldest party in the republic. Its name never appears on the ballot, but it’s always there and it has always served us well. Divided government.

If you’re a Republican concerned about national security who still (somehow) believes the Republicans are better at it, your president won’t change. But he will be forced out of denial and compelled to face reality. The Democrats, in a divided government, will also have to take responsibility for the hard choices involved in wartime. So divided government is win-win right now.

Vote Democratic next Tuesday, or if you just can’t, abstain. For the country’s sake – and for the soul of conservatism.

Not the president (who appoints the NSC). That’s his spin. Watch David spin. Spin, David, spin.

A reader writes:

I am a moderate living in Colorado Springs. The main thing that bothers me about those on the far right is their hypocrisy, with Ann Coulter and Ted Haggard being the latest two examples. Another comes to mind here locally as well:  ads for the local Republican candidate for the House that classify his opponent (a retired lieutenant colonel by the way) as a liberal, yet the administration that he is supporting has run up the greatest debt in our history.

I drive my kids and two of their friends to school in the morning and yesterday I was originally not supposed to pick my daughter’s friend up as she was to greet her father returning from Iraq.  She called and told us she needed a ride as they had evidently received a call that her dad would not be coming home yet, and we did not question as we were hoping nothing happened to him.  Today I believe that I saw the reason why.  Mr. Cheney will be here for a campaign stop this weekend part of which will be to greet the troops as they return.

So their reunion should be delayed for political purposes.

Yep. That sounds like Cheney to me. 

From the Washington Post today:

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets and that their release — even to the detainees’ own attorneys — "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage."

It couldn’t be because they would reveal the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy of torture and abuse, would it? I’ve said it before but the possibility that these three men will one day face charges of war crimes is a distinct possibility. Their desperate attempts now to hide what they have done in our name is predictable. If you re-elect them, their abuse of power will only metastasize, as torture always does.

National Review as occasionally a glorified press release from the Bush administration? Nahhh.

Stockholm, Sweden, 8.45 am.

The Harper’s profile from May 2005.