The Dish

This is a scary video. Do not click on it if you are squeamish, especially if you are at work (and I know you are). Put down coffee, drinks, or anything else, for that matter. Click at your own risk. And Happy Halloween. Just watch the car closely and see what special effects can do.

We may be approaching a moment a little similar to the moment when Barry Goldwater was tasked to go to Nixon in 1974 and tell him it was over and he should resign. No, I don’t mean Bush will quit if the elections are a disaster for the Rove strategy of "divide and terrify". I mean that the reality-based members of the Republican establishment, represented by James Baker, will step in and tell Bush he cannot stay in denial any longer about Iraq. All the options are grim – but the grimmest of all is the prospect of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rove continuing their deranged idea that their "strategy" has been anything but a shambles. That’s why it’s so important that the GOP is given a drubbing next week. It will provide an opening for sanity. There are enough sane Republicans and patriotic Democrats to make the tough decisions now needed.

What would that mean? Almost certainly a radical redeployment within Iraq along the lines sagely laid out by Fareed Zakaria in a must-read essay in this week’s Newsweek. We cannot leave prematurely, but neither do we have much chance of staying without making matters worse unless we threaten to leave in the near future. My own fear is that our only realistic option is the following, endorsed by Fareed:

There is one shift that the United States itself needs to make: we must talk to Iraq’s neighbors about their common interest in security and stability in Iraq. None of these countries – not even Syria and Iran – would benefit from the breakup of Iraq, which could produce a flood of refugees and stir up their own restive minority populations. Our regional gambit might well lead to nothing. But not trying it, in the face of so few options, reflects a bizarrely insular and ideological obstinacy.

We may have to open up negotiations with Tehran and Damascus. Both regimes are despicable. But our interests in stabilizing Iraq are the same as theirs’. Call it realism’s revenge. We don’t have to prop these regimes up or provide more legitimacy to them than is needed to prevent mass ethnic cleansing and/or genocide in Iraq. But we are where we are. We have to rely on China to deal with North Korea; and no stability in Iraq is possible without the Iranians, Saudis, Syrians and, perhaps most critically, Jordan. Zelikow gets this. So does Rice, I think. Cheney and Rumsfeld stand in the way, as they did at the beginning. And I’ve become convinced that the only way to dispense with Rumsfeld and neutralize Cheney is a big Democratic victory next Tuesday.

So if you want to make the necessary hard choices in Iraq, you know what to do next Tuesday.

(Photo of Maliki: Wathiq Khuzaie/AFP/GETTY.)

"In the Middle East a pessimist is an optimist with experience … [Iraq] gradually deteriorates to civil war [and] the US presence is more and more a part of the problem and not the solution. Democratization may lead to a radical Shi’a government," – former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, at Indiana University.

"If I know anything, I know scary, and giving this president and this out-of-control Congress two more years to screw up our future is downright terrifying," – Stephen King.

"At 20, I was obsessed with what people were thinking about me. At 40, I’d stopped being obsessed with what people were thinking about me. At 60, I finally realized that nobody had ever been thinking about me at all," – an old quip cited by John Derbyshire in a really touching and excellent column on his relationship with Christianity.

Derb really is a conservative of doubt, I think, and, despite his bouts of curmudgeon and prejudice, I’ve come to admire and respect his intellectual honesty, especially up against the Curia Santorumorum at NRO. I’d love to know what he thinks of my book. I have a dreadful feeling he might actually agree with a lot of it.

Well, it’s Halloween. Here’s an amazingly good CGI DVD extra from "The Final Fantasy: Spirits Within" by Ingmar Bergman, I think. They’re doing the dance from "Thriller."

Brother Barnes:

I personally think Republicans are going to lose the House … [T]he question is not whether they’re going to hold the House, but how ‚Äî whether they’re going to just lose a few more seats beyond that or a good number. Now, I don’t think they’re going to lose many more and so Democrats may have a numerical majority in the House, but not a working governing majority …

A longtime reader writes:

Why do you think the anger of the left – the decent left – is any less than yours? Do you think we feel less betrayed? Wrong. Do you think we are less betrayed? Wrong.

Like your African-American friends, many of us on the left knew the WMD argument was game. I wrote you years ago that the WMD was a set-up; that they knew it; that they lied about it; that they believed they’d find some old munitions left over from the first Gulf War that they could hold up and justify themselves with; that they were shocked shitless when they found the whole country swept clean and they were left standing there speechless like the idiots they are. But even I never suspected the level of incompetence and perfidy they’ve shown since – to the American people, and to the Iraqis.

Do I blame you for being mad? Not a bit. But keep in mind that those of us on the left who saw this coming – and saw a hundred other issues coming, from abrogation of the wall between church and state to the ballooning deficit – we have spent the last five years being called every ugly, vicious name in the book because we tried to stop this, because we tried to warn the American people: haters, traitors, pussies, weenies, liars, partisans, hacks, wacks, radicals, commies, atheists, morally confused, mentally challenged and anything, anything except patriots who love this country and everything it stands for – or ought to stand for. Even the name "liberal", that honorable word, has been made into a curse. So don’t tell me the anger of the betrayed and decent right and center is deeper. Just tell us thanks for keeping the faith, for fighting the good fight. Just for once, call us brothers and sisters.

And remember: don’t get mad. Get even. Keep speaking out. The book (yes, I’ve read it), the blog: they make a difference. They matter. When you explain, as you do in the book, how you see classic conservatism as the defense of liberty from brutality through doubt, caution, common sense and rigorous self-examination, when you show how our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution are classic small-c conservative documents, you build a ground for dialog between left and right and a way out of this mess.

I do not agree with all your views on particular policies – but that’s not necessary, because I respect and trust your good intentions and good faith, your essential humility and humanity – and I’ve seen you grow and change over the years, often, as now, with considerable pain. That’s to be respected, and it’s why I advise all liberals to give "The Conservative Soul" a read; it’s well worth it. In any case, we agree on the bedrock issues, which utterly transcend left and right. We can agree to disagree on particular policies here and there – and get on with it. The challenges we face in the coming years – from global warming to nuclear proliferation to economic instability – will require us to meet on common ground.

On these grounds, I have indeed come to see that many, many liberals are indeed my brothers and my sisters. And increasing numbers of conservatives as well, thank God. For some on the far left, Bush could never have done any right, ever. I’m not going to exculpate the hate-filled parts of the far-left. But many, many others on the left were right about these people in power; and I was wrong. I threw some smug invective their way and, in retrospect, I am ashamed of it. Sure, I recognized my error before the last election, but that doesn’t excuse it. Sure, some of it was just misunderstanding each other, in a climate of great fear, and some of it was just my arrogance that I was right. But that doesn’t excuse it all either. My book is an attempt to rescue something from the wreckage – an atonement of sorts – and to move forward.

Because the world still needs America: the decent America we all love and so many around the world do not see any more.

Here’s one reason for conservatives not to be afraid sitting out this election or voting Democratic. Gridlock! The best government we’ve had in recent times was the Clinton-Gingrich face-off. They restrained the worst in each other, brought out the best, and gave us welfare reform, peace, and fiscal surpluses. Bush worked well with another party in Texas. He’ll not be so comfortable in Washington. But simply checking the current abuse of executive power will force these people to face reality in Iraq, and make the government less liable to do so much harm, especially to the Constitution. Bruce Bartlett makes the case here. Money quote:

I think the American people like divided government. They don’t trust either party to run the whole show and believe deeply in the separation of powers that the Founding Fathers established in the Constitution. To most people, dividing government by political party is just another way of separating power.

Bill Niskanen of the Cato Institute points out that every war in American history that lasted more than a few weeks was authorized by a unified government. It’s also worth noting that every major entitlement program – the spending programs that are bankrupting the country – was enacted by unified governments.

The great strength of the American system is its capacity for divided government. If there was ever a time for it, it’s now.

It’s the Bollywood version of Michael Jackson’s "Thriller". "Thriller," of course, was an amazingly innovative music video. It redefined the genre. And this horrifyingly bad Indian version makes you appreciate it more.