The Dish

Well, we’ve had Reagan Democrats. And we’ve had Goldwater Republicans. Why not a new version: Goldwater Democrats? By Goldwater Democrats, I mean old-style libertarian conservatives who actually believe in fiscal responsibility, small government, prudent foreign policy and live-and-let-live social policy. After being told we are completely unwelcome among Republicans, should we shift to the Dems?

I have never thought of myself as a Democrat or left-liberal in any way. And there are plenty of people among Democrats I do not agree with at all. But it’s getting to the point that the illiberal, authoritarian big government Christianism of the GOP makes me completely supportive of backing the Democrats this time around. My one reservation is, of course, spending. But at this point, could they be worse than the GOP? No Congress has been worse on spending than the current crew since FDR! The war? Again, at this point, we desperately need some check on an administration utterly without prudence or a capacity for self-correction.

And so I find myself in a very uneasy alliance with Markos Moulitsas, who writes the lead essay in the libertarian magazine Cato Unbound. Strange bedfellows. But these are strange times.

He opposed it in all circumstances. He was no liberal. In World War II, the Japanese added "amendments" to the Geneva Conventions for the specific war with America. Sound familiar? Money quote from my friend Niall Ferguson:

[E]ven if you don’t see any resemblance between Bush’s "administrative regulations" and Imperial Japan’s "necessary amendments" of the Geneva Convention, consider this purely practical argument: As Winston Churchill insisted throughout the war, treating POWs well is wise, if only to increase the chances that your own men will be well treated if they too are captured. Even in World War II, there was in fact a high degree of reciprocity. The British treated Germans POWs well and were well treated by the Germans in return; the Germans treated Russian POWs abysmally and got their bloody deserts when the tables were turned.

Few, if any, American soldiers currently find themselves in enemy hands. But in the long war on which Bush has embarked, that may not always be the case. The bottom line about mistreating captive foes is simple: It is that what goes around comes around. And you don’t have to be a closet liberal to understand that.

It’s hard to disagree with some of the sentiments in this piece by Greg Mitchell, following the bombshell revelation in Bob Woodward’s book that Condi Rice had been warned on July 10 in very graphic terms about the threat from al Qaeda. Here’s why the July 10, 2001 meeting matters:

Woodward describes the meeting, and the two officials’ plea that the U.S. "needed to take action that moment – covert, military, whatever – to thwart bin Laden." The result? "Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off‚Ķ.Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long….

"Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, Tenet thought, but she just didn’t get it in time. Black later said, ‘The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.’"

And yet Rice has no recollection whatever of such a dramatic meeting and strongly denies it ever took place in the manner described:

Responding to the Woodward book, Rice told The Washington Post for Monday’s edition that an aide was checking on the meeting, but added, "What I am quite certain of, however, is that I would remember if I was told–as this account apparently says–that there was about to be an attack in the United States. The idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible."

So someone’s wrong. If Condi is, and she never told the 9/11 Commission, she’s in deep doo-doo.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Meet The Press/Reuters.)

The Foley scandal has some people saying some strange things, as Dave Weigel notes.

"Conservatives came to office to reduce the size of government and enlarge the sphere of free and private initiative. But lately we have increased government in order to stay in office. And, soon, if we don’t remember why we were elected we will have lost our office along with our principles, and leave a mountain of debt that our children’s grandchildren will suffer from long after we have departed this earth. Because, my friends, hypocrisy is the most obvious of sins, and the people will punish it," – senator John McCain, to the British Tories.

You can see this argument made at greater length in "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How To Get It Back," out next Tuesday.

(Photo: David Y. Lee for Time.)

St Louis, Missouri, 5 pm.

"If I catch anyone who leaks in my government, I would like to string them up by the thumbs – the same way we do with prisoners in Guantanamo," – president George W. Bush to Canadian prime minster, Jean Chretien, in March 2002. That’s according to Chretien’s closest political advisor in a new book. (Hat tip: Robin Rowland.)

Bill Clinton and John McCain: a profile of two different political giants, and the moral and political compromises they have made along the way. My Sunday Times column can be read here.

The fiasco in Iraq was preventable. But Rumsfeld insisted it occur. Good for Newsweek for telling it like it is:

The administration was not just unlucky. It was almost willfully blind to the risks entailed in invading and occupying a large, traumatized and deeply riven Arab country. Rumsfeld, who pushed aside Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell to take over even the planning for postwar Iraq, wanted a lean and mean force to get in and get out quickly. This was all well and good as long as American forces could turn over the job of running the country to an effective group of local Iraqis. But the planning for this was hamstrung by disputes over the postwar role of Iraqi exiles. When Iraq began to unravel, the administration—with little debate—lurched in the other direction. The White House installed Paul Bremer as a kind of grand pooh-bah over all of Iraq, but Rumsfeld refused to give him the forces he needed for a long occupation.

And Bush was so out of it and in denial that he simply acquiesced to the deranged intransigence of the real "decider," Dick Cheney.

A reader writes:

You seem to confuse age of consent with pedophilia. One is a legal standard and the other a psychological one. Age of consent does not determine pedophilia which has a clinical defintion, not a legal one. That definition is a sexual interest in prepubescent children. And Foley object of desire was far past the age of puberty. While referred to in the press as 16 years old (which was correct) he turned 17 and may have been 17 when the messages were written. In one such message he referred to turn 18 in a few months time.

So this is not pedophilia by any clinical definition.

If the Foley incident is not about pedophilia, it is also not, it seems to me, about homosexuality. It’s fundamentally about the closet. The closet is so psychologically destructive it often produces pathological behavior. When you compartmentalize your life, you sometimes act out in one compartment in ways that you would never condone in another one. Think Clinton-Lewinsky, in a heterosexual context. But closeted gay men are particularly vulnerable to this kind of thing. Your psyche is so split by decades of lies and deceptions and euphemisms that integrity and mental health suffer. No one should excuse Foley’s creepy interactions; they are inexcusable, as is the alleged cover-up (although we shouldn’t jump to conclusions yet about who knew what when). But there’s a reason gay men in homophobic institutions behave in self-destructive ways.

Or think of it another way: what do the Vatican and the RNC have in common? Here’s one potential list: entrenched homophobia, psychologically damaged closet cases, inappropriate behavior toward teens and minors … and cover-ups designed entirely to retain power. The parallels are looking a little creepy. And the source is the same.