The Dish

Spokane, Washington, 11 am.

"Need to be going to sleep but just finished doing a small segment on Real Time with Bill Maher. Like most of these interviews I was piped into via satellite so I wasn’t actually in the studio but I was struck by this:

At some point I said in response to a question that yes, Jesus actually does love everyone and that includes Democrats and liberals and homosexuals and the audience just erupted in applause. Here is the simple takeaway – people love Jesus they just disapprove of his self-appointed PR people who portray him as political and narrow and angry.

Maybe Jesus came to set us free so that sometimes we could turn around and set him free of the narrow portraits people paint of him, " David Kuo on this blog this morning.

David and I are planning on doing an online dialogue/interview soon about our respective books. Stay tuned.

A reader writes:

Your comments about the necessity to recognize doubt reminded me of the most profound moment I ever witnessed on television, namely, the final episode of a series called "The Ascent of Man", which aired in the early 70’s. You may of course be well versed in this already, and forgive me if you do, but briefly, the narrator (Dr. Jacob Bronowski) contrasted the certainty of Nazism with the contemporaneous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Standing in a swamp behind one of the Nazi death camps, Dr. Bronowski bent forward, and ran his hands through the muck of this swamp that contained the bodily remains of some of his family, while trying to explain the consequences of ideological certainty. I cannot think or tell of this without tears, and yet we seem never to learn these lessons.

By the miracle of YouTube, I found the moment my reader mentioned. He’s right. When will we learn? Here it is:

The Derb issues a fatwa:

The only thing we can usefully do then is to assert our existence as a voting bloc in the one way that’s available to us: by not voting.  That lays down a warning to any future GOP administration that might be tempted to go as badly wrong on important conservative issues as this one has.

This nation survived Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; it will survive Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel.  Ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, when our kids are voters, some GOP administration and Congress might be tempted to violate core conservative principles as egregiously as this one has.  But they will hear key voices, the voices of party elders and wise commentators, warning: "Remember the Great Congressional Massacre of ’06!  Let’s not risk  that happening again!"  And Congress and the admin. will then turn the wheel to the right.

Amen, sister.

The Catholic hierarchy is still protecting child rapists. In the name of God. Meanwhile, the Pope condemns "weak and deviant" gay relationships. I recall something Jesus said about motes and beams.

A reader writes:

I read with interest your reader’s comparison of the GOP’s cynical attitude toward evangelical Christians with the Democrat’s attitude toward African Americans and homosexuals. There are some very real parallels there, but with one crucial difference: African Americans and homosexuals are part of historically oppressed groups. They will never forsake politics, because they cannot afford to.

I cannot say the same for the evangelicals. In spite of a persecution complex that the leaders of the Religious Right have been cultivating for years (the secularists are out to get us!), conservative Christians, as a group, have never really felt the sting of persecution. And although many of them have a fundamentalist streak, they also have something that I like to call "world-flight syndrome." As much as they’d like to change the world politically, there’s a big part of them that just wants to sit in their corner and pray for the apocalypse, pray that God will take them away from this world that they, secretly, hate and distrust. If they become disillusioned with the Republican Party, they will not hesitate to abandon politics and focus on saving souls.

The Republicans are in a tight spot: they can’t give the evangelicals what they want for fear of losing moderates and sane conservatives, but if they don’t give the evangelicals what they want, they’ll lose them, too. It happened once before, when conservative Christians tried to block evolution from entering public schools – after the Scopes Monkey Trial, many of them abandoned politics, only to be revived in the 80s by the Moral Majority. And it’s happening again.

Evangelicals may come back this November for more punishment, but in my opinion, it’s only a matter of time. What we’re seeing is the beginning of the end of the "values vote."

Reading Kim Jong Il’s fine print.

You want to know how the federal government thinks about the spouses of gay people? Congressman Gerry Studds’ legal husband will be denied all his spouse’s pension, thanks to Bill Clinton’s and the Republican Congress’ 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. The only other Congressional spouses treated this way are those convicted of treason, espionage or murder.

Yes, I feel rage. Rage at every politician who voted for the despicable bill, and rage at everyone who supported it.

Matthew Parris puts the boot in. He would be more persuasive if many neocons hadn’t been making the point about the botched execution of the war three years ago.

"I think the regime change policy established under Bill Clinton was the right policy. I think taking Saddam seriously after 9/11 was the right policy. But, of the many arguments in favor of toppling Saddam in 2001-2002 one of the most important — in my mind and, I believe, in the mind of many others — was that toppling the Iraq domino and standing-up a stable, democratically inclined government was supposed to be comparatively easy. The demonstration-effect argument has not panned out.

I believe we’re in for a long war on terror. I believe the Iraq war was ‚Äî and is ‚Äî part of the war on terror. But resources ‚Äî political, economic, military, diplomatic etc ‚Äî are finite. And, I find it hard to believe that if we knew everything we know now back then we would have agreed to allocate them in the same way. Of course you can pile counter-factual upon counter-factual. If we had that sort of perfect knowledge back then we would have handled the initial looting differently. We would have done all sorts of things differently. Fine, fine. But that’s basically my point. I’m all for being on offense. But I think in retrospect we called the wrong play. But simply because you called the wrong play doesn’t mean you walk off the field," – Jonah Goldberg, yesterday.

It’s hard to disagree with him. I’m well into the Woodward book now and what’s striking is how many people in the government warned very clearly that this was not going to be easy – and they were ignored or fired or lost traction in internal fighting. The interesting question – unanswerable but also essential to ask – is obvious, and has been wrestled with elsewhere. Was this project always doomed or did the execution doom it? I’m still struggling with that question. Woodward’s evidence suggests that the incompetence and recklessness – almost carelessness – at the top was so staggering that historians will have a hard time separating out the variables for failure. But it doesn’t mean it was ever "comparatively easy." I made the dumb error of thinking that the administration would never leap into such a scenario with no real plan for the aftermath. I made the error of believing these people had even a minimal sense of responsibility. My only defense is that I have tried to avoid that error ever since.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)