The Dish

Maxim magazine fights back against shaved arms and faux-hawks.

Along with Rich Lowry, I have found that I cannot get this David Ignatius piece out of my head. This doesn’t help either.

Mike Crowley nails some retroactive editing by the senator from Utah.

Akbar Ganji was jailed by the mullahs in Tehran for six years for his political beliefs, and demonstrated his commitment by hunger strikes. What are those beliefs? Here is a new translation of a speech he once gave (link now fixed). It’s really a statement of classical liberalism, what Neil Tennant called "dear old, dreary liberal rights." By "liberal" I do not mean the infantilization of people under a cloying and growing welfare state. I mean the liberalism of the founding fathers, of John Locke, of the American Constitution. And part of that liberalism, according to Ganji, is as follows:

Liberals always accept religion in the private sphere. They protested the unity of the institutions of religion and government and still do. They are not anti-religion. Freedom of religion is a basic principle of liberalism. Contrary to orthodox Marxists who completely reject religion, even from the private sphere of individuals (since they considered it the opium of the masses), liberals believe that everyone must have the right to set up his life according to his religious beliefs. But the civic code must not be based on any particular religious teachings. It should guarantee the freedom of religion in the personal life and morality. Incidentally, a law based on the teachings of a particular religion is unable to guarantee the freedom of all religions.

Sometimes it takes a man living in an actual theocracy to remind us to be on guard against it, even with the blessing of the First Amendment. It gives me great hope to realize that for years, in some vile Iranian jail, someone knew his John Locke. Even while too many Americans have found it so easy to forget him.

Professor Bainbridge writes:

I see no reason why the MPA ought to energize the GOP base. If anything, it ought to make the base even more skeptical of the bona fides of the GOP Washington elite, whose sole remaining principle appears to be the will to cling to power.

Maybe that was their sole principle in the first place. I have to say I’m extremely heartened by this week. The hollow, ruthless cynicism of Karl Rove has finally dawned on the very people he has been manipulating for decades. This is a very good thing.

Greg Djerejian explains how ruthless Cheney can be in keeping the United States out of the Geneva protocols. There’s no mistake he will not compound.

Just to note that Senators Gregg and Specter turned against the FMA this time in the cloture vote. The Senate is more Republican than last time around, and the vote barely budged. If the Senate shifts to the Dems this fall – a likely scenario – this amendment will be pining for the fjords. That’s a victory for conservatism and federalism against fundamentalism and hysteria. One more time: Let the states decide.

Not so serious that he hasn’t diverted $1.6 billion out of the equipment funds for the military in Iraq to finance his Potemkin border patrol. Money quote:

The Marine Corps has seen nearly 3,500 pieces of ground equipment destroyed so far, and it has lost at least 27 aircraft in the Middle East. Every day in Iraq, trucks and Humvees age four to nine times faster than they do in peacetime because of the heat, road conditions, weight of the armor, and constant use, to say nothing of roadside bombs.
For the last three years, the Marine Corps has been cannibalizing its vehicles and weapons used in training, and draining its war reserves to keep deployed troops fully outfitted.

But they can wait. Karl Rove needs to appease the base before the election.

Commonweal editorializes. Money quote:

In his public meditation at Auschwitz, Benedict put forward a perplexing and unsatisfactory explanation of the Holocaust. He informed the world that the Nazi aim ‘deep down’ was not to exterminate the Jews, but to kill God. ‘By destroying Israel,’ the pope said, ‘[the Nazis] ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.’
Ostensibly designed to draw attention to the church’s Jewish origins, and to embrace the two faiths’ shared love for God, Benedict’s remarks may have the opposite effect. It seems unlikely that many Jews will take consolation from the theological assertion that the systematic murder of 6 million ‚Äî murders carried out in nearly every instance by baptized, and in many cases even believing, Christians ‚Äî was ‘ultimately’ an assault on Christian faith. The Holocaust was a desecration of many things, surely; but first and last it was about the slaughter of the Jews.

Maybe it’s hard for a Bavarian pope to see that.

(Photo: Gianni Giansanti/Polaris.)

He was fileted and sauteed last night by Jon Stewart. If you didn’t see it (we were watching the new Criterion Collection DVD edition of "Dazed and Confused" and I fell asleep around 11 pm) the clip is available here.