The Dish

A reader makes an important point:

This graphic is very powerful, but an aspect of it needs to be stressed. These power-point slides are prepared for regular briefings for leadership in the Pentagon (this means Rumsfeld, Cambone, England and others) and NSC (Cheney, Bush, Rice). They know all this. So check this graph against the rhetoric that pours from their mouths (like Cheney’s "they’re doing remarkably well.") They have no respect for the truth and no respect for the voters. They lie to us continuously. 

What drives their prevarications is also increasingly transparent, namely domestic partisan politics. And that’s despicable. It shows a contempt for the voters and a callous disregard for the health and safety of US forces in Iraq.  It’s sickening. We have six days until we get to say something about this.

One reason to vote Democrat or abstain next week is that we have a president prepared to lie through his teeth about the central issue of our time. He is dishonoring his office and shirking his responsibility. In peacetime, this is disgrace enough. In wartime, it is unforgivable.

I haven’t seen "Jesus Camp," what with the book tour and all. But I intend to when this election is over. Here’s a clip that is unsettling to me in a way I find hard to express. See for yourself:

Then there are letters to the editor of a local paper, like this one from a kid as young as the seventh grade. Karl Rove could not have instructed them better. A reader writes of his own experience:

I am a church musician in the Lutheran Church. To be more specific it is the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran church, which is theologically conservative.  Most of the members in my church are Republicans it seems, although I wouldn’t call them evangelicals. A good deal of people just assume that I am a Republican and the ones that know I’m not treat me as if I have an inferior faith or am a baby killer.

I don’t think I will ever forget election day of 2004. I was about to begin a children’s choir rehearsal with the kids in grades 2-8. One of the more vocal 8th graders asked me aloud if I voted that day. I said yes. She then asked "Did you vote for Kerry?" I paused and said nothing but I think my face told them that I did. These kids started booing! She then asked "Did you vote for Bush"?  After she asked the group started cheering. I just sort of shrugged and never answered the question, but I was simply stunned. I was booed without saying who I voted for by 10 year old kids that were obvious Bush supporters! It was surreal.

A reader writes:

Thanks for the link to the CSPAN interview. I still can’t get over the part where you talk about dealing with HIV. I’m sorry, Andrew. If it means anything coming from a part Irish Iowa whitebread hetero, I’m truly sorry.

I saw Janet Reno on CNN yesterday. She looks like she weighs 90 pounds. She weaved back and forth constantly during the interview and acted like she had lost her sense of balance – not as much as did Fox in the ad but I can be sort of thick sometimes and I thought they both showed the same basic symptoms. When I think of you and Reno and Limbaugh and Hewitt et al I can’t help but remember that dialogue from "Mississippi Burning", where the FBI supervisor tells the agent during the rainstorm that "these are gutter tactics". The agent responds "we have to get in the gutter to fight these people". The super asks why.

The agent responds "Because these people crawled out of the sewer!!!"

I guess so.

Washington, D.C., 8 am.

Deal with it, Mr President:

"John Kerry is awful, and anything we can do further to degrade his political prospects is worth doing. But really, I saw a clip of him making the much-deplored remark, and it was obvious that the dimwit in Iraq that he referred to was George W. Bush, not the American soldier. It was a dumb joke badly delivered, but his meaning was plain.  My pleasure in watching JK squirm is just as great as any other conservative’s, but something is owed to honesty.  There’s a lot of fake outrage going round here," – John Derbyshire, NRO.

On the last point, I absolutely agree. But, as I’ve written, the ad lib was obviously ambiguous – and there is, alas, a plausible inference to make it mean what some have jumped on. I understand why, if Kerry really didn’t mean that at all, he resists apologizing. I understand the rage at the cynicism of the way the right-wing machine has blown this out of all perspective.

But just as the president has to deal with reality, so does Kerry. The reality is that all the Bush machine needs for traction is a plausible inference – not even a probable one – and they have an issue. And that’s all Kerry needs to apologize for. It came out wrong. He can explain what he meant and still apologize if others interpreted it differently. And an apology like that kills this non-issue before it continues to obscure the life-and-death matters we have to deal with.

C.S. Lewis again:

"Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations…

The nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political programme can never in reality be more than probably right."

Four words: We. Do. Not. Torture.

The trouble is not that the president is evil. It is that he is utterly, absolutely convinced he is doing good. It’s a "no-brainer".

A new salvo from the Christianist-in-Chief.

While the media is obsessed parsing the ad libs of someone on no ballot this fall, something truly ominous has just happened in Iraq. The commander-in-chief has abandoned an American soldier to the tender mercies of a Shiite militia. Yes, there are nuances here, and the NYT fleshes out the story today. But the essential fact is clear. In a showdown for control of Baghdad, the Iraqi prime minister took orders from Moqtada al-Sadr, and instructed the U.S. military to withdraw from Sadr City. The American forces were trying both to stabilize the city but also to find a missing American serviceman. He is still missing. Money quote from the WaPo:

The move lifted a near siege that had stood at least since last Wednesday. U.S. military police imposed the blockade after the kidnapping of an American soldier of Iraqi descent. The soldier’s Iraqi in-laws said they believed he had been abducted by the Mahdi Army as he visited his wife at her home in the Karrada area of Baghdad, where U.S. military checkpoints were also removed as a result of Maliki’s action.

The crackdown on Sadr City had a second motive, U.S. officers said: the search for Abu Deraa, a man considered one of the most notorious death squad leaders. The soldier and Abu Deraa both were believed by the U.S. military to be in Sadr City.

The U.S. military does not have a tradition of abandoning its own soldiers to foreign militias, or of taking orders from foreign governments. No commander-in-chief who actually walks the walk, rather than swaggering the swagger, would acquiesce to such a thing. The soldier appears to be of Iraqi descent who is married to an Iraqi woman. Who authorized abandoning him to the enemy? Who is really giving the orders to the U.S. military in Iraq? These are real questions about honor and sacrifice and a war that is now careening out of any control. They are not phony questions drummed up by a partisan media machine to appeal to emotions to maintain power.

And where, by the way, is McCain on this? Silent on Cheney’s "no-brainer" on waterboarding. Silent recently on Iraq. But vocal – oh, how vocal – on Kerry. It tells you something about what has happened to him. And to America.

(Photo of an American soldier in Iraq – not the missing guy – by Yuri Kozyrev for Time.)

Laura Branigan’s "Self-Control." I have to say it is a near-perfect expression of the genre.