The Dish

She’s still cranky (warning: x-rated pics on this site; sorry for not warning earlier):

"I just saw the first of Madonna’s two concerts in Philadelphia, and I wasn’t thrilled with it. I simply wanted to see her – not be assaulted by an avalanche of pretentious, irrelevant images dizzily winking on giant screens. Alison enjoyed it – she’s much more of a True Blue Madonna fan, while I can’t turn off my beady critic’s eye. The lugubrious montage of doleful African orphans framing a glammed up Madonna as she reclined on her sparkly disco crucifix was too much by twenty miles."

I think Madonna’s latest incarnation is designed to appeal to Alison, not Camille. I loved the concert and the album as pure pop fun.

More classic Camille here – on Brokeback Mountain’s Heath Ledger’s "phlegmatic, shop-worn mannerisms borrowed from James Dean and Montgomery Clift" and "old dykes" as "tough customers". I can’t believe I beat Drudge to this.

A gripping first-hand account of what it’s like living there now.

Guess who personally blocked a Justice Department probe into the secret, warrantless, illegal NSA wire-tapping operation?

Tomorrow will be the first anniversary of the public hanging of two gay teenage lovers in Mashad, Iran. It will also be an International Day of Action Against Homophobic Persecution in Iran. Groups large and small will hold vigils from as far afield as Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Frankfurt, London, Marseilles, Mexico City, Moscow, New York, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Sioux Falls, Stockholm, Tehran, Toronto, Vancouver, Vienna, Warsaw, Washington DC … and Provincetown. The British House of Commons is holding a hearing. The underground Persian Gay and Lesbian Organization has asked us to support them as they live under a murderous, bigoted regime. Those of us lucky to live in free countries need to show these beleaguered people that we have not forgotten them, that their struggle for dignity and freedom is ours too.

If you are in Provincetown or on the Cape, and want to join us, please meet me and others outside Provincetown Town Hall on Commercial Street from 5 – 6 pm tomorrow, Wednesday, in a silent vigil to remember the two young victims of state murder – and so many others who fear the same fate for loving another human being. There will be no speeches. Just silence and witness. I’ve printed out posters. Bring a candle if you like. Or make your own poster or sign. Come one, come all.

George F. Will, whose calm, skeptical record in this war certainly bests mine and many others, opens a new front against neoconservatives today:

The administration, justly criticized for its Iraq premises and their execution, is suddenly receiving some criticism so untethered from reality as to defy caricature. The national, ethnic and religious dynamics of the Middle East are opaque to most people, but to the Weekly Standard – voice of a spectacularly misnamed radicalism, "neoconservatism" — everything is crystal clear: Iran is the key to everything…

So, the Weekly Standard says: "We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?" … "Why wait?" Perhaps because the U.S. military has enough on its plate in the deteriorating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both border Iran. And perhaps because containment, although of uncertain success, did work against Stalin and his successors, and might be preferable to a war against a nation much larger and more formidable than Iraq. And if Bashar Assad’s regime does not fall after the Weekly Standard’s hoped-for third war, with Iran, does the magazine hope for a fourth?

But Will’s most devastating line is early on in the piece:

[I]t is not perverse to wonder whether the spectacle of America, currently learning a lesson – one that conservatives should not have to learn on the job – about the limits of power to subdue an unruly world, has emboldened many enemies. [My italics.]

To be perfectly honest, although I agree that Bill Kristol’s call for yet another war has a whiff of the unhinged about it, I’m not so fond of the containment record in the Middle East of the past fifty years. It’s hard to "contain" non-state actors, fueled by religious fervor, operating from the safe-houses of patron rogue-regimes, with potential access to WMDs. My concern is that the engagement was so recklessly planned and executed that it has made matters temporarily worse rather than better. Whether it makes things permanently worse is now up to very deft manuevring from our leadership. And under the current president, let’s just say we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

NRO’s Michael Ledeen describes NYT reporter, Michael R. Gordon, thus:

Not all NY Times reporters have an axe to grind.

I wonder if he has read "Cobra II." It’s the most devastating – and devastatingly fair-minded – indictment of the Bush administration’s incompetence at war-management I have yet read (and that includes Suskind).

[The first posting of this item got the NRO poster wrong. Sorry.]

Just weeks after a national government and a major effort to pacify Baghdad, Iraq is witnessing sectarian massacres on a new and terrifying scale. 150 dead in three days. One recent massacre was by Sunni militias wearing Iraq national army uniform. The great danger of such unfathomable savagery is that, fueled by revenge killings and the lack of any credible government authority, it feeds on itself. This is why sufficient troops were such an important factor in the post-invasion plan. And why we – and thousands of murdered innocents – are now paying so brutally for Don Rumsfeld’s pride.

"What I’m trying to do with my time in the Senate during this whole debate we‚Äôre having is to remind the Senate that the rules we set up speak more about us than it does the enemy. The enemy has no rules. They don’t give people trials, they summarily execute them and they’re brutal, inhuman creatures. But when we capture one of them, what we do is about us, not about them. Do they deserve, the bad ones, all the rights that are afforded? No. But are we required to do it because of what we believe? Yes," – Lindsey Graham, Republican senator from South Carolina.

Monmouth Beach, New Jersey, 11.45 pm.

You play Pacman. A chimp plays Pacman.