The Dish

The "by whatever means necessary" rightists are now directing their fire at retiring Marine commandant, general Michael Hagee. One of his crimes was reminding Marines of ethics in wartime. We can’t have that now, can we? Not under this president.

A reader writes:

I agree that the gentleman in question has a right to his opinions and a fundamental right to express them.  I am no supporter of Bob Ehrlich, but it does seem to me that as the Metro employee is an appointee, and therefore representative of the Governor in a way other non-political employees are not, the Governor was well within his ‘rights’ to remove his appointee.  While Mr Smith is entitled to his opinions and may well express them publicly, as someone who holds office by appointment he should be aware that when he speaks he reflects upon the person who appointed him.  Had I appointed him, I, too, would have removed him.  Smith is free to express his opinions and practise his religion, but after remarks like that, not as my representative appointee to a state board, were I the governor.

My view is that as long as a public official enforces his public office fairly, his personal views on contentious matters should be protected from official punishment. I’m tired of this intolerant p.c. nonsense. A nuanced perspective can be read here.

A great Colbert catch. A congressman who co-sponsored a bill to display the ten commandments in Congress … can’t name them. Too perfect. The emperor’s clothes are slowly but inexorably falling off.

A reader makes a good point:

I loved the reference to Burke, but I think you do him a disservice in the comparison. I have not heard the song, but the first lines you reprint read "Well I bought a ticket to the revolution/ And I cheered when the statues fell…"  Burke most certainly did not buy a ticket to the French Revolution. In fact, he was a critic from the start, and his criticism would have been just the antidote to the preposterous optimism leading up to the debacle in Iraq.

His "Reflections" was written at the height of Revolutionary fervor in England – leading to his isolation and sneers that he had sold out to George III or that he had simply lost his mind. It is a story that was repeated in the early days of this war – the few voices who expressed doubt were called loons, unpatriotic, or cowards. Recall, however, that Burke proved prophetic: he called the Revolutionaries "regicides" long before Louis appeared in mortal danger; he predicted the Reign of Terror; and he even foretold the rise of Napoleon’s dictatorship. He argued that when you pull down all of a society’s traditional pillars, you are left with nothing to maintain order, leading to a widening gyre of chaos until extreme violence leads to oppressive government. Anyone who has read the work in the last few years could rather easily substitute in for France the word Iraq and little will seem to have changed. But the implication that Burke was on ever on board for the Revolution is wrong and does a disservice to those of us who saw his cautionary words as reason enough to oppose this madness long before it started.

Agreed. I didn’t mean to be taken completely literally. The war in Iraq may well prove Burke right about the capacity for societies to change by force of arms or revolution. If that had been the only rationale for war, I couldn’t have supported it. I bought the WMD threat argument (and then expected a coherent, sustained, generational attempt at nation-building). At the same time, Iraq is also more complicated than the analogy might suggest because Saddam had already destroyed Iraq’s civil society with the kind of rule Burke despised. And so an intervention at that point did not disrupt a functioning society, so much as interrupt a fast-disintegrating tyranny, and then allow its disintegration to accelerate. I guess I thought we could help prevent that disintegration; and had a window to rebuild a critical country in a vital region. But we never committed the resources to make that happen; and we misjudged how deep the rot had gone. Our mistakes made the attempt all the more Sisyphean.

In a truly depressing way, the violence that has engulfed Iraq since the liberation has not relented in any way with a new government and the Zarqawi capture. Few predicted it would, but the fact that it is now at near-record levels is not encouraging. In Basra, the trained police force has divided into rival tribal camps and are busy murdering each other. The prison system is completely infiltrated by Shiite death squads. And the trademark Jihadist suicide bombings of mosques – yes, mosques – continued yesterday with an event we have become used to but nevertheless bears restatement in an excellent report by Sabrina Tavernese:

By the guards’ account, the bomber brought the explosives into the mosque in his shoes. Guards became suspicious when one of them noticed a pair of thick-soled sandals in an odd place, felt that they were heavy, and found explosives inside when he tore them apart. A search of the mosque ensued, and another pair was found in a bathroom. They had been torn open.

The guards began moving through the crowd, frisking worshipers, looking for at least two bombers, said Ali Muhammad, 29, who also works as a bodyguard for Sheik Sagheer. They did not dare to make an announcement for fear of forcing the hand of the bombers…

As they searched, a man who was kneeling in the center of the room blew himself up, spewing shrapnel into the crowd, according to the guards’ account… By late afternoon, workers in rubber boots had begun cleaning the floor with squeegees. The red rugs that had absorbed the blood had been taken away. The room smelled like a butcher shop. Some workers wore masks.

Mr. Muhammad said he was bracing himself for more killing, despite Mr. Zarqawi’s death. "There are still some people, I feel sorry to say this, Iraqis, who cooperate," he said. "Iraqis who enjoyed their lives under Saddam Hussein and treated others like servants."

A mosque turned into a butcher shop. And we are the infidels?

Rohrersville, Maryland, 7.50 am.

Reading this story upset me. A man is fired by the Maryland governor from his job as a member of the state’s Metro transit authority board. His sin? Speaking his mind about homosexuality, in a context which in no way affects his ability to do his job. I deeply disagree with his views and they could have been expressed more civilly, but he has every right to them, and they are indeed intrinsic to his understanding of his own religious liberty. Words hurt no one. Firing him for his views is an act of profound intolerance – by governor Ehrlich, and by my own city councilman, Jim Graham. The gay rights movement needs to practise the same tolerance it is asking for. Leave orthodox Catholics – and Protestants – alone in the expression of their own faith, and their own politics.

Denver, Colorado, 11 am.

… he’d write a lyric like this:

Well I bought a ticket to the revolution
And I cheered when the statues fell
Everyone came
To destroy what was rotten
But they killed off the good as well
Sometimes the solution
Is worse than the problem
Let’s stay together.

The new album from pop geniuses Tennant and Lowe is now available. It’s called Fundamental. The remix companion album is called Fundamentalism. The Pet Shop Boys are against it. As all conservatives should be. (If you want a taste, YouTube has a couple of great recent PSB videos for two recent songs, "Miracles" and "Flamboyant." "Miracles" is sublime.)

"It’s true that you and I are not being grabbed on the streets and sent to a former secret police torture-training camp in Godforsakistan. Nor is the government eavesdropping on your international phone calls or mine. Probably. Because I like you, I’ll forgo the usual ominous warning about how they came after him and then they came after her and then they came after you. I’ll even skip the liberal sermonette about how even bad guys have rights.

But your rights and mine are not supposed to be at the whim of the government, let alone the president. They are based in the Constitution and the willingness of those we put in power to obey it – even as interpreted by judges they may disagree with. The most distressing aspect of this story is the apparent attitude of our current rulers that the Constitution is an obstacle to be overcome – by conducting dirty business abroad or by wildly disingenuous interpretations of laws and the Constitution," – Mike Kinsley, on the way in which this administration has essentially bypassed the Constitution in order to protect it.