The Dish

I’ve seen this one before but it’s still amazing. Up there with Michel Gondry. It seems to me that advertizing isn’t recognized enough as an art form. Just because it’s selling something doesn’t mean it cannot also be an aesthetic experience at the same time – and, sometimes, a great one.

My Times (of London) column, which was subject to a computer glitch, can now be read in full here. It’s on signs that Condi Rice may be beginning to make headway against the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis.

That’s one way to describe my email in-tray the last day or so. Greg Djerejian explains.

The Scottish historian, Niall Ferguson, changes his mind and decides independence is the best route for Scotland’s future. It might indeed help sever the country’s unhealthy dependency on its Southern neighbor, end some of its chippiness, and force it to make some market-oriented reforms. Or maybe they’ll continue to commit economic suicide with their suffocating and over-bearing government. Adam Smith has been a stranger in his own land for some time now, alas.

Eric Umansky raises some doubts about Ron Suskind’s book. The comments are worth reading as well. I should get it from Amazon today. Suskind has worked for the Wall Street Journal, has a Pulitzer, and has good sources in the intelligence industry. I’ve no doubt some of his sources are fighting back against Cheney and the president. That doesn’t mean they’re not real; and that what they’re saying isn’t true. It certainly fits the pattern we have come to understand. And I say that as someone who once – stupidly and prematurely – lionized this president in the wake of 9/11.

Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 3 pm.

"I’m a big fan of getting around the privileged class. So, you know, we do have a Huey Long today. He’s called Hugo Chavez. When the levees broke in New Orleans we had a president who sent in rescue teams and desalinization plants. It was Chavez, but our State Department sent back the planes. In the book I report on Chavez’s assassination ‚Äî I just thought I’d do it in advance. You know, I reported on two stolen elections (2000 and 2004). Now I’m reporting on 2008 being stolen. I figure if I do it in advance I might be able to affect things," – Greg Palast on his forthcoming book.

"My fellow progressives, when you scorn everybody who does not agree with everything you say, a process inimical to human nature ensues. When you shout people down and call them names, they tend to get defensive and either shut down or shout back at you. When an ultra-progressive (of which I bear some traits) tells a moderate liberal "you are full of shit, f*** you," that’s not the best way to get buy-in on any of your ideas.
Not the best way to engage your fellow citizens. For if you go down this absolutist path, you lose the opportunity to engage, and change, the minds of those whose critical mass we really need to change things about what is wrong with our nation and the world," – Russell Shaw, HuffPuff.

A reader writes:

I can’t believe you would put the interrogation policies of the Bush administration and the barbaric beheading of another human being on the same moral plane. You wrote today:

"My point is that we can no longer unequivocally condemn the torture of these two soldiers because we have endorsed and practised torture ourselves."

Until you can show me evidence that a U.S. Government interrogator has taken a dull knife, cut into the throat of another man or woman, and sawn through skin, muscle, tendon, and bone until the head of that persons detaches from their neck, please don’t make such an intellectually dishonest comparison between these barbarians and our own government.
Our enemies are fundamentalist nihilists. We may have to fight a harder, dirtier war against such a disgraceful enemy. But we still must do what is necessary to win.

This is an honest argument: to fight barbarians, we must become more like them. I disagree; I believe torture is always wrong, and profoundly corrupts the torturing nation that endorses it. I also think that in the short and, even more, in the long run, it will prove our undoing in this war. This is a battle between barbarism and civilization. We cannot destroy our moral compass in order to save it.

Professor Bainbridge writes:

Andrew Sullivan seems to think that the Bush Administration’s position on torture is at least a – if not the – root cause of the death by torture apparently suffered by two US service personnel.

No I don’t. In fact, I explicitly argued against such an idea here. My point is that we can no longer unequivocally condemn the torture of these two soldiers because we have endorsed and practised torture ourselves. What was once a difference in kind between us and our enemy is now a difference in degree. That fact profoundly weakens our moral standing in the world, the power of our cause, and impedes the long-run success in the war of ideas that the war on terror involves. That this change was made secretly by an executive violating the express laws he is constitutionally bound to enforce makes the betrayal all the more enraging.