The Dish

A reader writes:

Katherine’s a nutter. No one in Florida is voting for her. She’s the clown princess of Florida politics. Nelson will whip her ass. I’m a lifelong Republican and I’m voting for Nelson on the competence issue alone, as are my Republican friends.

Cut the crap, and quit trying to peddle your bullshit by painting Harris, and extremist nutter, as indicative of all Republicans. It’s irritating straw mannery and it’s one of the reasons conservatives don’t take you seriously anymore.

So how exactly did a fringe nutter get to run for the U.S. Senate in a critical state? My litmus test was Katrina. The president was reluctant to interrupt a vacation for a hurricane but he flew at a moment’s notice to do the religious right’s bidding in the Schiavo case. If you want to vote for the Republicans, fine. But please don’t fool yourself like I once did. This is the party of Harris, Brownback, Dobson and Santorum. It is no longer the party of Goldwater and Reagan.

Katherine Harris’ Florida Senate campaign is now becoming an entirely religious battle:

Six weeks after urging voters to elect only "tried and true" Christians, Senate candidate Katherine Harris is questioning her opponent’s faith by saying he "votes completely contrary" to Christian principles.

In an interview published by a Christian news service, Harris said incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson "claims to be a Christian" but supports policies "completely contrary to what we say we believe."

And people say I’m exaggerating the extent to which religion has now trumped politics in the GOP.

A moderate from Amsterdam sees increasing radicalism among Holland’s Moroccan youth:

"I really want to impress upon you that it is five to twelve in this neighborhood. You have to realize that as an Amsterdam public official you can’t accept that we have a neighborhood in our city that is a homefront for radical youths and where there is no end to the number of broken families.

It is simply not true that hate ends where people know one another. These boys know their brothers and sisters, their neighbors and teachers. And they hate even them as unbelievers. You can’t approach them. I desperately need specific expertise to deal with this."

He’s a military lawyer who argued the case – successfully – for Osama bin Laden’s driver. He’s subsequently been all-but-fired, of course.

A reader writes:

I finished read Woodward’s book today. Two observations:

First, as a person who has failed at some things in life, the portrait of failure is entirely credible to me. I don’t know how to explain it, exactly – but the psychology of the thing, and the way people behave, all seems right.

You’re in this thing, and you’re in way over your head, and you can’t fix it, because you don’t control enough of it to fix it, so you keep going through the motions, and you sort of close off and don’t make trouble, because you don’t want to speed up the inevitable collapse – it all feels real.

Second, I have a real question about Republicans in the senate, responsible people in the house, etc. I don’t think Woodward’s book is new or radical – I think it sort of represents a kind of middle of the road consensus on Bush’s prosecution of the war. By that I mean that I think that everyone involved in real work in Washington knows the score, and Woodward just sort of makes it official here, by documenting a lot more of it.

The Democrats are too f***ed up to deal with this problem. They’re not going to do it. Will the Republicans do their duty and challenge the president? When Nixon went, it was because Republicans told him he had to go. They looked at what had happened, saw the bigger picture, and did what was right for the country.

Republicans need to force Bush’s hand on Rumsfeld. And if they don’t do it, they’re not doing their duty to the country. It’s really as simple as that.  Everyone knows he has to go, and for some reason, the president can’t or won’t do it. He must be forced.

I think John Warner will be part of this. McCain has too much at stake to be credibly disinterested. Rumsfeld has already begun to acknowledge that reality has overtaken his ideology. The question will be if Cheney is enough of a patriot to ditch his long-time pal. Or if Bush is strong enough to tell Cheney to do it for him. But it must happen after the election. We cannot let the pride of these men supercede the vital interests and security of the West.

(Photo: Brooks Kraft/Corbis for Time.)

What should this Congressional election be about? A critical decision about whether to re-commit new resources and manpower to Iraq or pull out? Or a Washington sex scandal that raises serious questions about responsibility, but none about the country’s policies as a whole? Money quote from my column today:

My sense is that the American people, when confronted with imminent defeat and withdrawal [in Iraq], may balk. If they have vented against the war in the election, they might be open to arguments about winning it afterwards.

If McCain emerges as Bush’s successor he could mount an election campaign on a plan for more troops and victory. If Hillary Clinton, the senator for New York state, is the Democratic nominee and tries to out-hawk McCain, her party will turn on her. If Al Gore, the defeated candidate in the 2000 presidential election, is the nominee and urges withdrawal from Iraq, then he might win the nomination but be vulnerable in the final campaign.

Either way you can see how a big Republican defeat next month will play a critical role in the course of the war. It could certainly empower McCain. It could split the Democrats. Or it could empower the anti-war Democrats in a congressional takeover, jolt them to cut off funding for the war, as happened in Vietnam, and force a retreat sooner than expected.

The war, in other words, is in the balance in this election.

And yet we’re talking about IMs.

Here’s another interesting one from Montana: reframing the terrorism debate and defending individual liberty in wartime.

The president is kept from hearing about it; and he won’t read the papers. But that doesn’t mean we can’t understand more. this email from a soldier in Iraq lays out some brutal, hard truths. Read it. And repeat after me: Fire. Rumsfeld. Now.

Amsterdam, Holland, 2 pm.

"This scandal is like the Cliffs’ Notes version of a more complicated treatise on how the Bush movement operates. Every one of their corrupt attributes is vividly on display here:

The absolute refusal ever to admit error. The desperate clinging to power above all else. The efforts to cloud what are clear matters of wrongdoing with irrelevant sideshows. And the parade of dishonest and just plainly inane demonization efforts to hide and distract from their wrongdoing: hence, the pages are manipulative sex vixens; a shadowy gay cabal is to blame; the real criminals are those who exposed the conduct, not those who engaged in it; liberals created the whole scandal; George Soros funded the whole thing; a Democratic Congressman did something wrong 23 years ago; one of the pages IM’d with Foley as a "hoax", and on and on.

There has been a virtual carousel — as there always is — of one pathetic, desperate attempt after the next to deflect blame and demonize those who are pointing out the wrongdoing. This is what they always do, on every issue. The difference here is that everyone can see it, and so nothing is working," – Glenn Greenwald, calling it like it is.

(Photo: Lauren Victoria Burke/AP.)