The Dish

Dr K has an insightful point:

A better formulation [in sending a message to North Korea] would be the following: ‘Given the fact that there is no other nuclear power so recklessly in violation of its nuclear obligations, it shall be the policy of this nation to regard any detonation of a nuclear explosive on the United States or its allies as an attack by North Korea on the United States requiring a full retaliatory response upon North Korea.’

This is how you keep Kim Jong Il from proliferating. Make him understand that his survival would be hostage to the actions of whatever terrorist group he sold his weapons to. Any terrorist detonation would be assumed to have his address on it. The United States would then return postage. Automaticity of this kind concentrates the mind.

This policy has a hitch, however. It works only in a world where there is but a single rogue nuclear state. Once that club expands to two, the policy evaporates, because a nuclear terror attack would no longer have a single automatic return address.  Which is another reason why keeping Iran from going nuclear is so important. With North Korea there is no going back. But Iran is not there yet. One rogue country is tolerable because it can be held accountable. Two rogue countries guarantees undeterrable and therefore inevitable nuclear terrorism."

But there’s another hitch, as well, I suspect. What about Pakistan? I fear that there are elements within the Pakistani government and intelligence services that would be only too willing to hand over nuclear wepaonry to Islamist terrorists. And Musharraf’s hold on power is tenuous.

A reader writes:

The past 6 years have been like being in a desert on drugs. Reason was an illusion, principles laughable. The Bushies sought to implant democracy elsewhere, while dismantling our constitution. They berated countries for their human rights treatment while we were ourselves abusers. They abandoned science in favor of convenience. They focused on fringe issues that mobilized their base instead of core issues (energy independence, the environment, our entitlement crisis, our crumbling infrastructure, etc.) which are still unresolved and lacking in clarity of purpose. In the end, they sought power rather than statesmanship, and have been corrupted by it. And we, sadly, have been lessened.  I applaud your strength of character and the temerity of your thinking. I long to drink from the trough of small ‘c’ conservatism without being shamed.

All we can do is keep explaining why this administration represents an attack on conservatism, not its triumph. Then we have to trust Americans to use the powers the founders gave them and check this out-of-control administration by voting Democrat or abstaining this November.

As Jon Stewart said of John McCain, Giuliani has turned his straight talk express into a bus to bulls**t-town. The Stranger notices the U-turn.

Fox News stars also pitch products on the radio. Are they journalists or salesmen? Paul Mulshine says that whatever the answer, they aren’t conservatives.

Victor Davis Hanson has given Hugh Hewitt’s stand-in, Dean Barnett, the vapors. Money quote:

"I would be by his side like a Spartan at Thermopylae."

Just so long as you’re not right behind him, Dean. Barnett is even dreaming of sending fawning IMs to conservative students. I thought we needed a constitutional amendment to stamp out that kind of thing.

Seriously, of course, VDH has written some great stuff and, having debated him, I know what Barnett is talking about.  But his defenses of this administration’s Iraq war are getting thinner and thinner. We know the rationale; and we know the stakes; and many of us want to win. Instead of repeating why the war matters, why not use his great mind to explain what the Bush administration has gotten wrong and how to put it right? VDH wants to win this war. So why keep backing people who only know how to lose?

[In the first draft of this post, I didn’t realize it was Dean Barnett who was writing on Hugh Hewitt’s website, not Hewitt himself.]

In Iraq, an American citizen who appears to have had no fair trial and is being frog-marched to the death penalty with the help and support of the U.S. military. He has no rights any more, of course. Scott Horton explains the facts and background of the case here. Money quote:

On Tuesday, the President intends to sign the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which purports to terminate the writ of habeas corpus for US detainees overseas. In so doing, he may well be confirming a death sentence for Mohammed Manaf. This case is shocking because it deals with an American citizen who is being stripped of his rights under a foreign legal process, including the right to a trial, at the insistence of US Forces. It provides strong grounds to question what US Forces are doing in the Central Criminal Court of Iraq. As a practitioner in that court, I can only say that none of the facts detailed in the Brennan Center’s papers or described by the defendant’s attorney strike me as surprising. They are consistent with things I observed with my own eyes in Baghdad in the spring of this year.

What passes for justice in Iraq right now – in a Baghad in sectarian meltdown – is a travesty. But it is merely a tiny glimpse of the threat to basic liberties that this president has advanced and pioneered.

A boy sings about his two fathers – and how much he loves them. He was adopted when he was one.

Just a reminder that I’ll be reading and signing books in Washington, D.C., tonight at 6 pm at Politics and Prose at 5015 Connectitcut Avenue; I’ll be on CNN’s Reliable Sources tomorrow morning at 10 am. And the C-SPAN interview with Brian Lamb is broadcast Sunday night at 8 pm and 11 pm. I just got back from Hartford, and need a nap. Later.

Anti-gay initiatives are not creating much excitement among the Christianist base of the GOP, according to this NYT piece. Why? Perhaps the more people see the non-event of marriage equality in Massachusetts and the benign impact of civil unions in several other states, they realize that the push against gay couples is less about saving civilization, and more about cynical partisan politics. Virginia’s proposed draconian ban on any rights for gay or straight couples outside of heterosexual-only civil marriage may be the test case. If it loses, the tide may have surely turned. In New York State, a democratic Rubicon has also been crossed.

Arlington, Virginia, 11 am.