The Dish

PBS asked us both the same questions about the political impact of blogs. You can see our contrasting answers here.

I saw this on the main site of my corporate overlords and it made me both immensely sad and yet also hopeful. It’s of a wedding in Iraq by AP photographer, David Guttenfelder. It says more than I can.

The White House’s last gambit to legalize war crimes was to force the military lawyers to sign a letter disowning their previous opposition to the Bush administration military tribunal and Geneva-breach proposal. The kind of political pressure being applied to the professional military by this administration is breath-taking and shameless. These people are beyond belief. Lindsey Graham is rightly furious. Every tactic this Bush-Cheney crew has deployed to retain the right to torture detainees reveals a president as ruthless and scruple-free as he is incompetent. It’s a toxic brew. Here’s a critical interchange on the issue from Tony Snow’s presser today. The JAG’s letter can be read here.

(Hat tip: Josh.)

A large number of American liberals and left-wingers have signed an American version of the Euston Manifesto, dedicated to opposing Islamism, the violence and terrorism it has fomented, and the intolerance and illiberalism at its core. You can read the full text here. Money quote:

We are signers or supporters in the United States of the Euston Manifesto and its reassertion of liberal values. Our views range from those of centrists and independents to liberals of varying hues on to the democratic left. We include supporters of the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 as well as people who opposed this war from the beginning. However, we all welcome and are heartened by the decision of the writers of the Euston Manifesto in Britain to reassert and reinvigorate liberal values in the present context. Now we confront the issue of how to respond to radical Islamism. Some of us view this ideology and its political results as the third major form of totalitarian ideology of the last century, after fascism and Nazism, on the one hand, and Communism, on the other. Others regard it as having a history in the Arab and Islamic world that eludes the label of totalitarianism. We all agree however that it fosters dictatorship, terror, anti-Semitism and sexism of a most retrograde kind. We reject its subordination of politics to the dictates of religious fundamentalists as well as its contempt for the role of individual autonomy and rationality in politics, a rejection not seen on this scale in world politics since the 1940s. We understand that the United States must continue to take the lead with our allies in confronting this danger.

Count them: Republicans John McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins joined with the Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee to vote the Senate bill, retaining Geneva protections, to the full Senate floor. The committee vote was 15 – 9. That’s what I’m hearing. Here’s the latest news story. More later – because I haven’t had a chance to read the small print. But the bottom line is: Rove’s gambit may be backfiring – and for the Senate to rebuff the president even as he lobbies them personally is a stunning rebuff, and a victory for American decency and honor. Now Karl Rove will have to win a Republican re-election by campaigning against at least four Republican senators. Stay tuned.

Zurich, Switzerland, 11 am.

A reader writes:

Like you I too believe "we need to breathe new life into [the rationality of faith] in a world where religion is too often described as an irrational leap or ‘submisson’ to an illogical God" and I find the Pope’s lecture very interesting. But, with his major role in the drafting of Dominus Iesus, I can’t help but wonder if we are to hear a double-meaning in his appeal to logos. Specifically, John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The Word is, of course, identified with Jesus and has been since the early Church Fathers. Thus, if we read this double meaning into Benedict’s lecture, his penultimate sentence takes a different meaning, one which echoes Dominus Iesus and the controversy it generated:

"It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures."

It is to this Christian conception of God as Father and the belief that through his Son, the Word (logos) made flesh, that salvation lies.

In addition this invitation to a "dialogue of cultures" is itself a new and controversial development in interreligious relations between the Church and non-Christian religions. Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald was removed from his post at the Vatican as the president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and was made nuncio to Egypt. At the same time, the PCID was subsumed under the Pontifical Council for Culture. Money quote:

According to several sources, sending Archbishop Fitzgerald from the Vatican to Egypt could signal a shift in the Holy See’s approach to dialogue with the other religions, a tougher stance in the relations with Islam, and a greater insistence on evangelization and the preaching of Jesus Christ as the one savior of humanity.

Pope Benedict has made it clear that he does consider true theological dialogue with non-Christian religions impossible (with the exception of Judaism). Instead of theological engagement, he sees only cultural dialogue; this is major shift from Pope John Paul II.

(Photo: The Polish Government.)