The Dish

Great Cacapon, West Virginia, 4 pm.

Yesterday, David Brooks and I had a very lively and productive debate about what has gone wrong with conservatism in America and how to fix it. The event was sponsored by the CATO Institute. We agreed on some; and disagreed vehemently on some. We also responded to some provocative questions and challenges from the packed crowd. David homed in one some of the weak spots in my book and I did my best to respond. I think it was a debate that actually fostered more light than heat. Imagine that.

You can watch a live-stream video of the event here. Or you can listen to an audio MP3 file; or download the debate onto your iPod on the same page.

To my mind, Iraq and Afghanistan should be the central issue in this campaign. We need to talk more about IEDs than IMs. The news from both Iraq and Afghanistan is dreadful and disturbing. There are reports of a suicide bombing cell in Kabul and a serious risk of losing the South of that country to the Taliban. In Iraq, the latest effort to bring order to Baghdad, the minimal amount necessary to stabilize the country, appears to be failing. This is despite a real commitment of resources to the capital, more U.S. troops and a systematic sweep of bad neighborhoods. Money quote:

An intensified U.S.-Iraqi military sweep launched in Baghdad in August has been clearing neighborhoods house by house of weapons, militiamen and insurgents.

Despite the sweep, the capital continues to see a deadly combination of attacks by Sunni insurgents and tit-for-tat killings and bombings by Shiite militias and Sunni groups, which have killed thousands this month.

The American fatalty rate just jumped. The fundamental issue is whether the "government" there has any monopoly of violence, which makes it possible for US troops to delegate responsibility for public order. It appears it doesn’t. Even government ministers backed by their own militias are finding it hard to control them as sectarian mayhem advances. At some point, the U.S. will have few people to talk to in order to restore order, let alone a functioning state. Here’s another deeply troubling statistic I found in the NYT today:

A government organization responsible for overseeing Shiite mosques issued a report on Tuesday that offered another window into the sectarian violence that has plagued Iraq since the destruction of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February.

In the two and a half years before then, going back to August 2003, there were only 80 attacks on Shiite mosques, the report said. In the eight months since the Samarra bombing, there have been 69. More than 1,700 people have been killed in such attacks since 2003.

All of this forces us to making the toughest decision yet. The status quo is unacceptable. We must either ratchet up our effort or cut our losses. If I had confidence in the leadership, I’d back the former. Under Rumsfeld, I have zero confidence in any effort to stabilize Iraq. But we know this president is simply immune to pressure unless forced. So vote Democrat. Give them partial responsibility for the war effort – before a presidential election. And force Bush finally to take some responsibility for the chaos he has helped create.

(Photo: Yuri Kozyrev/Time.)

Fox News is fair and balanced as usual – and Mark Foley is labeled as a Democrat.

"The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism, and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds that it would deem vile if they were done by any other," – Louis de Bernieres, "Birds Without Wings."

The Democrats just released the following pic via email:

A reader corrects:

Please, the massacre in Pennsylvania is NOT getting ignored (it led NBC’s Nightly news) thanks to the Foley scandal.

What IS getting the short shrift is what is actually happening in Iraq (17 soldiers/Marines killed over the weekend, 50 plus bodies turning up in the capital despite a blanket curfew for Baghdad that included pedestrians, British soldier killed in Basra area) and Afghanistan (2 more U.S. soldiers killed in Kunar province; 2 more Canadian soldiers killed in Kandahar; over 300 schools closed in southern Afghanistan due to Taliban threats).

I stand corrected. What I meant to say is that most of Washington was consumed with the Foley story, not the Amish murders. And my sloppy writing probably reveals my own complicity in that more than anything else.

It turns out that there is an actual case of actual pedophilia in this country that merits some attention. Money quote from CNN:

Pennsylvania schoolhouse killer Charles Carl Roberts IV told his wife he molested young relatives 20 years ago and was dreaming about molesting children again, police said Tuesday.

Investigators talked to relatives and analyzed suicide notes as they tried to determine what made Roberts barricade himself inside the tiny Amish school, tying up girls and shooting them – five fatally – before killing himself Monday.

Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller said Roberts may have targeted the school for its girl students and – given various items found in the school – intended to molest the children. Roberts brought KY Jelly lubricant to the schoolhouse where the assault occurred, but there is no evidence that the victims were sexually assaulted in any way, Miller said.

"It’s very possible that he intended to victimize these children in many ways prior to executing them and killing himself," Miller said.

Here we have a case far graver than the Foley scandal, in which little girls had their legs bound and were shot in the head. The trauma of the event for the survivors must be unbearable and unending. It happened in a quiet corner of rural America. And yet it barely got airtime. Because it won’t have any effect on the November elections. Which is an indictment of all of us.

Dick Cheney gets a critic of his arrested for daring to challenge the vice-monarch in public. It doesn’t surprise me. But it does disturb me that a man like this now has the power to detain anyone in this country at will, designate them an "enemy combatant," and jail them indefinitely.

NRO’s The Corner is worth wading through if only for Rick Brookhiser. This will probably make him less popular among NRO-niks but I’m almost always enlightened, educated and impressed by his writing. Anyway, he seems to me to grasp the issue of Hastert. It’s not so much a horrifying cover-up as simple bad management:

Hastert bungled this sky-high, through psychological naivete in the service of wanting to avoid a problem. Telling Foley to go and sin no more was like telling a drunk to go and drink no more. It’s easy to think like that when you don’t want to rock the boat.

Not a capital crime, just misjudgment. A reader makes the case more expansively here::

I think Hewitt misses the reason that Hastert may be in trouble.

When I first read the e-mails, they seemed creepy because they came from an adult to an unrelated minor with whom the adult had not extensively worked (and one was about one of the pages); it’s not accurate to say that they were creepy only because Foley was gay and because the page in question was male. But I entirely agree that they weren’t "strong" enough to justify formal action.

The problem for Hastert is that there is a stage in these incidents short of taking formal action – when you realize (or should realize) that a particular member of Congress has a "problem". That is, based on the e-mails and on the apparent reputation that should have been known by those supervising the pages, Foley appeared to be someone who not only was attracted to pages, but also was not willing to maintain the proper personal distance between himself and the objects of that attraction.  This is exactly the scenario that would exist if the member was heterosexual and the page was of the opposite sex, or for that matter, if a member had a bad temper and had a tendency to verbally abuse the pages, or if a member had a drinking problem that led him to engage in embarrassing public misbehavior.

It’s basic management:  Realizing that you have a problem supervisor, figuring out the extent of the problem and addressing that problem. It doesn’t look like Hastert did it; if he had, he might have realized that even if he couldn’t "prove" that Foley had violated any law or rule, he was someone, at the very least, who should be discouraged from seeking re-election because he was a potential embarrassment to the party and to the Congress. At the very least, he should have spoken with Foley about the situation and made it clear that someone else was better suited to represent Republicans in Foley’s district. It was Hastert – not ABC or the newspapers – who had an obligation to make sure that Republicans in Foley’s district weren’t nominating someone who might embarrass them.

If I was a member of Hastert’s caucus, I’d have serious doubts about his management ability. And that’s reason enough to get a different speaker, regardless of whether it gives a "victory" to the other side. The failure to hold Hastert responsible for his failure lends credence to the theory that the current GOP majority is suffering from an arrogance of power and needs to be brought down.