The Dish

He wasn’t obsessed with it, as a reader reminds me:

Note one important corollary [about Lewis’ distinction between civil and religious marriage]: Lewis wouldn’t have regarded such a distinction as permissible if he thought that "non-Christian marriage" and relatively easy divorce was a really serious sin, any more than he regarded, say, murder or thievery as morally permissible for non-Christians. The same thing is true of his attitude toward homosexuality – as far as I can determine, he mildly disapproved of it but was simply too morally sane to regard it as a serious sin:

"I have never been able to understand how sexually normal people can regard homosexuals with anything other than a kind of bewildered pity."

We don’t need the pity, but this is certainly infinitely more agreeable than self-righteous hatred. And in the chapter of his autobiography dealing with the year he spent in a horrendous private school that he calls "Belsen", he notes that the top-ranked bullies had an accompanying set of catamites – and then talks at some length about how this was the only sign of genuine human affection that existed in the place, and points out that there are infinitely worse sins.  (He wrote this in the Britain of 1958.)

Hold the vapors. And watch the swoon.

Here’s a graph that helps illustrate the astonishing leap in federal spending under the Bush Republicans. It’s from the conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation. There are more helpful graphs here. Note that in the 1990s, spending plateaued and even fell slightly. As soon as Republicans controlled the White House and the Congress, it took off. Whatever else these people are, they are not fiscal conservatives.

It’s South Park’s version of the anti-immigrant campaign ad I posted yesterday. "They took our jobs!"

A reader writes:

I saw your interview with Brian Lamb on C-Span last night. I think if Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were alive to have seen it, they would have been cheering you on. They would have been saying, he has got it. He understands us, in contrast to President Bush who does not. In fact, they would be saying George Bush is not even close to understanding what it means to have a Conservative Soul.

There are more anti-Bush conservatives out there than you’d think. At least judging from my email in-tray.

Someone finally asked the president directly about a torture technique he has personally authorized – waterboarding. A member of the MSM did it – Bill O’Reilly. Money quote:

O’REILLY: Now Brian Ross of ABC said ‚Äî reported the CIA water boarded Mohammed. That is dunked him in water, tied him down and then that broke him. Is that true?

BUSH: We don’t talk about techniques. And the reason we don’t talk about techniques is because we don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust. We’re in a war.

O’REILLY: Is water boarding torture?

BUSH: I don’t want to talk about techniques. And ‚Äî but I do share the American people that we were within the law. And we don’t torture. We ‚Äî I’ve said all along to the American people we won’t torture, but we need to be in a position where we can interrogate these people.

O’REILLY: But if the public doesn’t know what torture is or is not, as defined by the Bush administration, how can the public make a decision on whether your policy is right or wrong?

BUSH: Well, one thing is that you can rest assured we’re not going to talk about the techniques we use in a public forum. No matter how hard you try because I don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust their tactics if we capture them on the battlefield.

But what the American people need to know is we’ve got a program in place that is able to get intelligence from these people. And we’ve used it to stop attacks.

The intelligence community believes strongly that the information we got from the detainee questioning program yielded information that made America safer, that we stopped attacks.

Secondly, the courts. Yes, I believe that it was necessary to have military tribunals because I ultimately want these people to be tried. And it took a while to get these tribunals in place.

The Supreme Court ruled that the president didn’t have the authority to set up these courts on his own, that he needed to work with Congress to do so. And we did.

What’s interesting about these votes that took place in the Congress is the number of Democrats that opposed questioning people we’ve picked up on the battlefield. And I think that’s an issue that they’re going to have to explain to the American people.

Good for O’Reilly. Bush’s answer is, of course, preposterous. If al Qaeda is not aware that its members could be waterboarded by the CIA, then it has not had access to the Internet for a very long time. Notice also the abuse of English by this president. Here’s his description of torture: "questioning people we’ve picked up on the battlefield." It’s a direct lie on many levels. Many of those we have tortured were not on any battlefield. Many in Gitmo are innocent and many have been released as innocent. Secondly, we have moved from the plain English "torture" to "coercive interrogation techniques" to mere "questioning." This is simply lying. If the president were asking for the right merely to question detainees, there would be no debate at all. But he isn’t. And we all know that, don’t we? Even those who support the president on this have to concede he’s lying, right?

I have three looming talks/book signings. Tomorrow, I’ll be reading, debating and signing books at Borders, 1801 K Street NW, in Washington D.C. at 6.30 pm. On October 21, I’ll be at the Wisconsin Book Festival, reading and signing at 1.30 pm, at the Memorial Union Theater, 800 Langdon Street, Madison, Wisconsin. And I’ll be at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs at the James Hotel in Chicago on October 23 at 5.30 pm. Then on to LA for Bill Maher’s show.

Don’t forget you can get a signed copy if you email a request to theconservativesoul@gmail.com. And don’t forget our Book Club. In three weeks’ time, I’ll be airing the best criticisms of my book via email on the blog and responding to their points. You can join in by buying the book here and emailing theconservativesoul@gmail.com with your comments, criticisms and questions. Thanks for the many thoughtful emails I’ve already received. I’m a little swamped, but I will try and respond to as many as I can.

I may regret this, but after our spirited discussion of the merits of 1980s music, here’s a contest. Ransack YouTube and find either a) your favorite ’80s music video from a period you love or b) one that exemplifies all that you loathe about the decade’s pop music. I’ll post the two best and the two worst. Put "Best/Worst 80s video" in the content line of the email. It helps me sort through the mailbag. YouTube only, please.

Max Boot makes a practical, constructive proposal for rescuing what’s left of democratic Iraq. Money quote:

We have more than 140,000 troops in Iraq, but fewer than 4,000 of them act as advisors. There are barely enough to go around for higher-level Iraqi headquarters; there are no "embeds" available to consistently operate at the company and platoon level, where most of the action occurs. The Iraqi police forces are even more neglected.

What’s more, some of the best and brightest American officers are being steered away from Iraqi units. Everyone in the U.S. armed forces knows that the way to the top is to command American units, not to advise foreign units ‚Äî even if the latter task is more difficult and more important.

We have to make it prestigious within the military culture to be embedded with and training Iraqi forces at all levels. Right now, it isn’t. That has to change if we are to have a chance.

A passionate war supporter now urges pragmatism, nuance and flexibility even in defining what our actual goals are in Iraq. Money quote:

My only observation is that Iraq is never quite the same place over time. While there are elements about it which endure, the character of the conflict has changed in so many respects that the correct frame of reference (it seems to me) is not back towards some archaic policy expectation expressed in a 2003 or 2004 document but in identifying the drivers of the dynamic and attempting to influence it in ways that only become apparent as you go along. Our goals are something we will have to discover.

I know this sounds awfully wooly and unspecific, so let me try it explaining the thought in this way. Nonlinear dynamic systems like unstable societies are very sensitive to initial conditions. Arbitrarily small perturbations can lead to significantly different effects in the future; hence their behavior can’t be predicted confidently very far into the future. You can’t treat them in a linear manner. The only way to handle them in by shortening your reaction cycle to manage and so, hope to influence where the system will converge given enough time.