The Dish

Among the vows:

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

Why has this vow been broken?

The story of an honorable servicewoman in Iraq:

Army specialist Alyssa Peterson was an Arabic speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at the Tal-afar airbase in far northwestern Iraq near the Syrian border. According to the Army’s investigation into her death, obtained by a KNAU reporter through the Freedom of Information Act, Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed.

Instead she was assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards. She was sent to suicide prevention training. But on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle.

A fuller account of this American heroine can be read here.

Yesterday in Iraq:

At least 18 Iraqis were killed in a series of attacks across the capital on Wednesday, and 35 bodies were found. Casualties mounted in a suicide attack on a wedding party. In all, 23 Iraqis, including 9 children, the bride and the groom, were killed in the blast, The Associated Press reported. Gunmen seized two Sunni coaches from a youth center on Wednesday. One of them taught blind athletes.

You’re doing a fantastic job, Rummy.

These fools cannot hold on to power for ever.

It’s the only deep explanation for this president’s inability to cope with empirical reality:

Misjudgments fostered in part by closed-mindedness may be regrettable, but they are also imaginable in many administrations. The difficulty in getting international consensus for the Iraq war was frustrating, for example, but explicable given the enmeshment of French, Russian and German business interests in Iraq. All of this, in other words, is understandable, and requires no theory of the new conservatism to explain it.

What is not understandable, however, is the almost non-existent preparation for war made by the Bush administration, the stunning lack of foresight about the dangers of Iraq after invasion, and the continued reluctance of the administration to adjust once clear mistakes had been exposed. Given the stakes involved and the immense difficulty of the task, it is still difficult to explain a war-policy of what can only be called reckless intransigence.

Some of the errors can be attributed to the fog of war, to the inevitable mismatch between theory and practice, between war-plans and an actual conflict, taking place in a deeply divided country sealed off for years from most outside contact, and exhibiting what can only be called post-totalitarian syndrome. No one should expect perfection.

But what we witnessed was something far more disturbing: a refusal to account for reality, to acknowledge error, to prepare for all contingencies. In searching for an explanation for that, we have to return, I think, to the kind of conservatism George W. Bush had internalized.

In that world-view, what mattered was the ideological analysis: good versus evil. What mattered was the assertion of the United States’ right to act alone if necessary to defend its own security. What mattered was the zero-sum analysis that we had to choose between war against Saddam and a potential mushroom cloud in an American city. It was this rigid and abstract analysis that essentially abolished the idea that the war was subject to rational debate… The fundamentalist makes his mind up instantly, makes the fundamental decision, and cannot, by necessity, stop short at a later date and ask himself if he’s right. Such second-guessing undermines his entire worldview. It threatens his inner psychological core.

And this narrative – amazingly – continued throughout the post-invasion anarchy … In the wake of growing chaos, murder and political drift, the Bush presidency merely insisted that nothing was wrong …

Part of this brittleness can be understood as public relations. War-leaders do not want to be seen second-guessing strategy in public. Much of the opposition in America would have jumped on any concession to reality by the president and used it against him. But again, this doesn’t fully explain the rigidity of the Bush White House, its imperviousness to empirical criticism, its insistence on the inerrancy of its leader, and its ruthlessness toward critics. What does help explain it is the fundamentalist mindset. A strong inerrant leader is typical of such religious groupings; deference is regarded as the natural response to such a hierarchy; criticism is immediately conflated with sin or weakness or treachery. Loyalty, however, is always valued – even when it appears ludicrous."

That’s from my new book, "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How To Get It Back," which tries to explain at a deeper level the hijacking of conservatism by this fundamentalist president and the Rove machine. We are surely in the ludicrous phase now.

From Michael "Heckuva Job" Brown to Donald "Fantastic Job" Rumsfeld, we see the same psychological profile. Woodward is right about this president. This is not conservatism. This is simply denial of reality. In these perilous times, it is beyond disturbing.

(Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty.)

George W. Bush just gave the most powerful reason for voting Democratic next Tuesday. He has reiterated unconditional support for the two architects of the chaos in Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld. He intends to keep Rumsfeld in his job until 2008! Why not a medal of freedom while he’s at it?

Let me put this kindly: anyone who believes that Donald Rumsfeld has done a "fantastic job" in Iraq is out of his mind. The fact that such a person is president of the United States is beyond disturbing. But then this is the man who told Michael Brown he was doing a "heckuva job." And, yes, our Iraq policy begins to look uncannily like the Katrina response.

The president, in other words, has just proved that he is utterly unhinged from reality, in a state of denial truly dangerous for the world. He needs an intervention. Think of this election as an intervention against a government in complete denial and capable of driving the West off a cliff. You can’t merely abstain now. Bush just raised the stakes. And he must be stopped.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

Some saints have stood up to the church hierarchy when the hierarchy was wrong. And some saints were demonized, attacked and rebuked by the hierarchy for doing so. Sometimes speaking truth to power – Catholic power – is the Catholic thing to do.

Another Republican says: enough.

"I think we have an administration today that is dysfunctional. And if it can’t get itself together to organize a serious program for finding nuclear material on its way to the United States, then it ought to be replaced by an administration that can," – Richard Perle – I repeat, Richard Perle – on the shambles that is the Bush administration, and the danger they pose to the basic security of this country.