The Dish

The American Prospect hired Brendan Nyhan to blog for them. Good idea. Brendan has a sterling record as a non-partisan blogger who calls things as he sees them. So he criticized some left-wing blogs for hyperbole. This is what then happened:

Last Wednesday, controversy broke out when I slammed two liberal blogs for using an airline employee’s suicide after 9/11 to take a cheap shot at President Bush. My post, which initially contained a minor factual error, prompted one of the bloggers, Atrios (aka Duncan Black), to label me the "wanker of the day" and to call on TAP editors to "rethink things a bit." Hundreds of Atrios readers filled the Prospect’s comment boards with vitriol. In an email Friday morning, Sam Rosenfeld, the magazine’s online editor, asked that I focus my blogging on conservative targets. He specifically objected to two posts criticizing liberals (here and here) that I wrote after the Atrios controversy. I refused and terminated the relationship.

Why was I asked to slant my work to the liberal party line? In an email statement, TAP editor Michael Tomasky said that "[t]he Prospect is hardly averse to criticizing liberal verities" and that the magazine had no problem with my initial posts criticizing liberals, but "there were a few posts in succession that struck us as either inaccurate or an effort to draw equivalencies where none existed. The Prospect has always opposed a ‘pox on both houses’ posture, and that’s what we came to believe you were doing."

Sorry, Michael, but that’s pathetic. The blog partisanship on the right is often depressing – and boy would I have been fired long ago if I had ever been blogging on a "conservative" site. But the politburo on the left is no better. And to think we once believed the blogosphere could liberate independent thought. Yeah, right. You can now read Brendan, freed from the liberal thought police, at his own blog. Support free thought. They won’t.

"In fact, there has been plenty of politics, and not all that much religion, out of the Bush Administration and the Republican Party over the past six years. There are theocrats and theocrat-wannabes out there, but they’re really not much in evidence in the Bush Administration’s policies," – Glenn Reynolds, yesterday.

"Sides are being chosen, and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will … It is for us then to do as our heroes have always done and put our faith in the perfect redeeming love of Jesus Christ," Tom DeLay, legislative architect of Republican policies for much of the last decade, in March of this year.

Michelle Malkin has come out in favor of fair trials for convicted terrorists, argues for their right to see evidence used against them at trial, and hopes the International Criminal Court hears their case. Of course, these standards do not apply to the United States government, in which case she supports indefinite detention of a journalist without charges, and accuses him of being a terrorist on the word of the military. This really is the new moral standard for conservatives: the whole world must abide by the principles of Anglo-Saxon justice, except the United States. No other country may torture, but we can. It is, as Glenn Greenwald explains, "beyond satire."

The theocons’ favorite nominee is firmly in favor of torturing terror suspects in interrogation – and has clearly positioned himself as McCain’s opponent on the issue. I presume he thinks it will win him votes among Christian, Republican base voters.

"On the one hand, we are faced with a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, nuclear blackmail and terrorist chaos at the heart of the world’s Persian Gulf oil supply, and terrorist-planted nuclear weapons in America’s cities. On the other hand, we can choose an economically disruptive war with Iran that will alienate us from the world, push us to and beyond our military limits, and that even then may not even succeed. The by now stock phrase, "there are no good options" doesn’t quite do justice to the awful choice we face," – Stanley Kurtz, pretty accurately summing up the place we find ourselves in.

I wondered yesterday if Dean Barnett thought being Jewish was a liability in the South. He replies, rather oddly, here. To continue the debate, the Kazakh celebrity, Borat, performed a social science experiment in a country and western bar in Arizona. It contributes, well, something to the question we were debating, although I confess I’m not sure what.

If you haven’t had a chance to see the HBO documentary on Barry Goldwater by his grand-daughter, you might want to take the time. It didn’t have enough politics for this junkie, but it certainly brought to life the spirit of a conservatism now almost entirely eclipsed in the Republican party. Goldwater had no truck for government spending, and raged at the fiscal excesses of his time. By today’s Republican standards, the spending he was fulminating against was peanuts. Goldwater was an adamant defender of states’ rights, a principle he stuck with even though it meant being smeared as a bigot and a racist. Bush’s GOP has no principled interest in federalism, from its education policies to its attacks on states that violate religious doctrines on such issues as marriage, end-of-life matters and even medical marijuana. From the 1970s, Goldwater recognized Falwell and the religious right for what they are: charlatans who have as much concern for traditional conservatism as big government liberals do. What Goldwater would have said about the Schiavo case would not be broadcastable on network television. He also adhered to the old conservative notion of live-and-let-live. He never had a problem with gays, and although he clearly found abortion an awful thing, he wasn’t about to remove a female citizen’s right in the early stages of pregnancy to control her own body. He was, in other words, a conservative. Or as his great book put it: a conservative with a conscience. And if he was a conservative, then the current Republican party and the current president simply aren’t. More and more observers recognize this, especially those who do not have a vested or financial interest in sustaining the charade that this is a conservative administration in any meaningful sense.

The documentary makes much of Goldwater’s stance on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Johnson’s astonishingly courageous move to back it. The irony of Goldwater’s career is that this decision, made on a principled stance of federalism and limited government, became something else on the ground. It shifted the Republican Party base away from California and the sun-belt into the Deep South. Goldwater was a Western conservative, not a Southern one. And whichever party the South controls will have a hard time reflecting the kind of skeptical, libertarian, tolerant principles Goldwater believed in. So he both created American conservatism and laid the grounds for its eventual implosion. All these years later, the end-result is a Texan president who hasn’t seen a civil liberty he wouldn’t junk at a second’s notice, who bases campaigns on subtle appeals to prejudice and fear of minorities, who has doubled the debt of the next generation, expanded government at a pace not seen since FDR, engaged in two reckless wars without the preparation or manpower to succeed, presided over a government riddled with incompetence and cronyism, and who has nominated candidates to the Supreme Court using their religious faith as a criterion. Whatever else Bush is, he is not merely not Goldwater. He is, in many ways, his nemesis. Which is why conservatism as we have known it has been strangled – by the Republicans. And why the fight to resurrect it must start from almost the same parched earth on which Goldwater confidently took his stand.

Seeing him today, one remembers what courage is. And it’s long past time conservatives summoned some up.

What follows below is a dramatization of a "waterboarding". It’s taken from the USA network award-winning show, "The 4400" on YouTube. Since I have only read descriptions, I cannot verify its accuracy in detail – but it certainly captures the essence of this technique directly authorized by the president, and used by the CIA at the behest of the president and vice-president. The clip lasts around 30 seconds. Most victims apparently do not last that long. If you believe that what you are watching is "severe mental or physical pain or suffering," then it is torture under U.S. law, and the U.N. Treaty. It is undeniably a violation of the Geneva Convention. If it is torture, according to the president himself, then it should stopped. At this moment in history, let us at least look at what is being done by the government; and call it by its proper name. 

Missoula, Montana, yesterday. If readers driving around find explicitly political and partisan Republican messages on church buildings or signs, please send them in. This one doesn’t cross the line. But I wouldn’t be shocked to hear they didn’t have that sign up under Clinton.

A reader writes:

Andrew, this "Jesus camp" makes me think Stephen Glass was just a little ahead of his time. Remember one of his fake stories was "Peddling Poppy", in which he describes his visit to the "First Church of George Herbert Walker Bush Christ", run by a group of evangelicals who thought "41" was the reincarnation of Jesus.

Ah, yes, Stephen Glass. Ewww. But you need Twain or Mencken to capture today’s religious right accurately. And Glass was and is no Mencken.