The Dish

Radar Online does some investigation of various hair styles on Capitol Hill. My favorite: the "Just Nuts" look.

Michael Crowley notices a sign of the times.

Glenn Reynolds and I have had our differences. But we have at least one thing to bring us together. Yesterday, we both became uncles. Here’s the first guarantee that the Sullivan name will continue on my DNA line. He’s called Ben. He looks quite pleased to be here. And he has more hair than I do.

The conservative revolt appears to be growing. Here’s Dick Armey talking to Ryan Sager:

Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from? There‚Äôs not a conservative, Constitution-loving, separation-of-powers guy alive in the world that could have wanted that bill on the floor. That was pure, blatant pandering to [Focus on the Family President] James Dobson. That’s all that was. It was silly, stupid, and irresponsible. Nobody serious about the Constitution would do that. But the question was will this energize our Christian conservative base for the next election …

Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies. I pray devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no excuse for being stupid. There’s a high demagoguery coefficient to issues like prayer in schools. Demagoguery doesn‚Äôt work unless it’s dumb, shallow as water on a plate. These issues are easy for the intellectually lazy and can appeal to a large demographic. These issues become bigger than life, largely because they’re easy. There ain’t no thinking.

But there’s been a lot of following and excuse-making, hasn’t there?

Marty Lederman brings light to the detainee debate:

It’s important to be clear about one thing: The question is not simply whether, in the abstract, it would be a good or acceptable idea for the United States to use such techniques in certain extreme circumstances on certain detainees. I happen to think that the moral, pragmatic, diplomatic and other costs of doing so greatly outweigh any speculative and uncertain benefits — but that is obviously a question on which there is substantial public disagreement, much of it quite sincere and serious.

Instead, the question must be placed in its historical and international context — namely, whether Congress should grant the Executive branch a fairly unbounded discretion to use such techniques where such conduct would place the United States in breach of the Geneva Conventions. And that, of course, changes the calculus considerably. Does Congress really want to make the United States the first nation on earth to specifically provide domestic legal sanction for what would properly and universally be seen as a transparent breach of the minimum, baseline standards for civilized treatment of prisoners established by Common Article 3 — thereby dealing a grevious blow to the prospect of international adherence to the Geneva Conventions in the future?

That’s what is at stake: whether the global super-power, sixty years after helping create the Geneva Convention, now wants formally to legislate that its minimum standards of humane treatment no longer applies to the U.S. and thereby to any other government on earth. The consequences of doing that are so grave – for U.S. troops and for the world at large – that we simply cannot allow it to happen.

A reader writes:

I agree wholeheartedly with your opinion that the White House’s pressure tactics against the JAG chiefs is "breath-taking and shameless." But, the JAG chiefs were not without a choice. If they really felt as strongly about this matter as they seemed to in front of Congress last week, then the only honorable thing for them to do, in my opinion, would have been to resign their commissions in protest, no matter the personal consequences. By signing those letters, the JAG chiefs stained their own honor and violated their sworn oaths to defend the Constitution. We are truly living in dark times when the defenders of our Republic so meekly surrender to the thuggish cabal that currently haunts the White House.

They’re also soldiers and were being pressured by their commander-in-chief. Some lee-way is merited, in my view.

Brooklyn, New York, 11 am.

Islam has its own version of the End-Times. And Ahmadinejad believes the Apocalypse is coming. A fascinating first-person account of how Iran’s leadership has fused religious prophecy with political power here. And, yes, it scares the wits out of me as well.

By chance I bumped into Senator John Warner last night at the fifth anniversary party for the Chris Matthews Show. I was able to go up and shake him warmly by the hand and thank him from the depth of my heart for protecting this country’s honor. He replied quite simply: "It’s just the right thing for the country." The sight of so many Republican senators and one former secretary of state finally standing up against the brutality and dishonor of this president’s military detention policies is a sign of great hope. It turns out there is an opposition in this country – it’s called what’s left of the sane wing of the GOP. Slowly, real conservatives are speaking out loud what they have long said in private. The apparatchiks of the pro-torture blogosphere can vent, but it is hard to demonize the new opposition as "leftist" or "hysterical." Warner? McCain? Graham? Powell? These men who have served their country are somehow less reliable on matters of war than a man who never went to the war of his own generation and has bungled the two critical wars on his own watch? Please. These men are less serious about confronting terror than Dick Cheney, whose own record of commentary in Iraq would be dismissed as unhinged and absurd if he were a lowly blogger? Please. This should have happened long, long ago – before the explosion in spending, before the conflation of religious dogma with conservative politics, before the reckless indifference toward the immensely challenging task of occupying a foreign country.

But this is not over. There are rumors that if the president and Rove cannot use the torture issue to browbeat Democrats, they will use it to wage war on those few principled conservatives left in their own party. The president may veto a war-crimes bill that actually keeps war crimes illegal. He may still use the issue as a rallying cry for his base, as a way to help turnout in November. He will argue that only he has the cojones to waterboard a terrorist, and that therefore only he can keep America safe. Running on the president’s prerogative to torture? Why not? There are no ethical boundaries that this president recognizes in political warfare, just as there are no ethical boundaries he will not cross in actual warfare. Here’s the campaign theme:

"I just think John McCain is wrong on this. If we capture bin Laden tomorrow and we have to hold his head under water to find out when the next attack is going to happen, we ought to be able to do it."

This from Pete King, a man who appeased Irish terrorism for much of his political career. I’ve learned one thing about this administration these past few years: they are capable of pulling any lever, using any tactic, to keep the power they have so arrogantly abused. This is not over. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, Haynes, Cambone, Rove: they’re warming up.

(Photo: Daniel Ochodeolza/AP.)

"The United States has seen political swings and produced its share of extremists, but its political character, whether liberals or conservatives have been in charge, has always remained fundamentally Burkean. The Constitution itself is a Burkean document, one that slows down decisions to allow for “deliberate sense” and checks and balances. President Bush has nearly upended that tradition, abandoning traditional realism in favor of a warped and incoherent brand of idealism. (No wonder Bush supporter Fred Barnes has praised him as a radical.) At this dangerous point in history, we must depend on the decisions of an astonishingly feckless chief executive: an empty vessel filled with equal parts Rove and Rousseau," РJeffrey Hart, one of the true intellectual architects of American conservatism in the modern era, calling this president what he is: a dangerous, reckless, ideological incompetent.