The Dish

The response to the first podfisk has been extremely positive, with some advice and caveats:

I must admit, the first minute or so of it did not instill great confidence. Commenting on whether or not the President is bored sets a tone that conveys an inclination to reject whatever he says. Certainly, you are completely justified in doing so at this point in the Administration’s history, but I still think it’s unnecessary.

However, once the speech got rolling, you did well, and I found your commentary to be excellent. More broadly, by doing this for an entire speech (as opposed to the one-off line analysis typically found on Russert and the others), you are simply unable to take a line out of context and truly get away with it, because such a stunt would easily be exposed as the speech continued. Finally, through your podfisk, you made me do something I never thought possible – I actually listened to an entire radio broadcast by the President.

Yes, my other half said the same thing about the snarky beginning and edited some of it out. He was right. He tends to be. Another reader notices something:

Could I make a suggestion if you do what you call "podfisking" again? Don’t be drinking or smoking or whatever it was you were doing when you recorded that – very distracting.

They’re suppressed belches, alas. I’d just eaten three sloppy joes and knocked back a Jager shot. I’ll do the next one on an empty stomach. Meanwhile, on the substance, a recently married gay reader writes:

Marriage is absolutely nothing like being partners/boyfriends/lovers. It is so incredibly richer than I ever imagined it could be. Even though our marriage is Canadian and isn’t recognized in the U.S., it is recognized by our families and friends and coworkers, and most importantly by us. You have no idea the treasure that has been kept from gays and lesbians because we haven’t been able to marry. It isn’t just a one-time act in front of an audience, it is a life-altering event joining two people as one.

Having attended one last year and basically bawled through the whole thing, I know. It is life-altering; it is ennobling; it’s experientially more intense than anything most gay people have ever experienced. It heals emotional wounds many gay people don’t even know we bear. And that’s why some want to keep it from us. They want to keep us from those feelings of being one with our own families; they want to keep us outside the society we grew up in; they want to deny us the love and support heterosexuals take for granted. Marriage humanizes gay people and shows us in the context of love and commitment, rather than merely sex. This corrodes the far right’s attempt to portray us as "subhuman" or "objectively disordered" or "sinners". That’s why they are so adamant on keeping us as second class citizens. But we have to trust the good sense and ultimate tolerance of most Americans. They have every right to be leery of such a change; and we have a duty to explain and argue and persuade them why they’re wrong. Person by person, state by state. But it’s great, I might add, to be getting so much support from so many straight people as well. Thanks, Jon Stewart. We won’t forget who stood with us in this.

The Federal Marriage Amendment fails again in the Senate – miserably.

No, podfisking not some bizarre sexual practice indulged by Norm and Midge. It’s just a podcast version of a fisking. A fisking – a term derived from the many times bloggers have dissected the deranged writing of Robert Fisk – is a genre that takes a text by someone else, and responds to it sentence by sentence, point by point. As I listened to the president’s radio address this week on the proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage, I got the idea. Who better to be my first podfisk subject? Why not fisk via audio? So I spliced his speech with my responses on Apple’s GarageBand program. Voila: a podfisk. It’s my first attempt so forgive any rough edges. All suggestions for future podfisks welcome.

Listen to it here

(Photo: Mandel Ngana/AFP/Getty. Artwork by Aaron Tone.)

As many of you must be aware, our redirect server from andrewsullivan.com failed again this afternoon. What’s left of my hair has now been torn out. But we’re back now.

The 23-year-old blogger behind the Vatican’s version of Wonkette has now been profiled. And about time too. Money quote from Rocco, reminiscing about an encounter with a cardinal at the age of eight:

[Cardinal Bevilacqua] asked me, ‘Well, do you want to be a priest?’ And I had never thought of it. I thought about it for a long time and decided it wasn’t what I wanted. But he told me a lot of the ways things work because I was so curious. So there was an intellectual thing. But that led to faith, to trust, to love, to the living encounter with Christ, which is the core of the work, but I don’t talk about that all the time. So much of what I do stems from that, to share that with people and give them a sense of what I learned. To pull them in intellectually and with the sensual. The beautiful thing about Catholicism is that it is a faith of the senses. It isn’t puritanical ‚Äì or at least it shouldn’t be. It is in a lot of quarters today, but it’s a faith that rejoices in every part of reality. It’s just the greatest allure in the world and when it calls you, it’s very tough to not take that.

What a beautiful expression of Catholicism at its best. Rocco’s blog, Whispers In The Loggia, is a real gem. I’ve linked to it before. And he needs financial support. So go there and donate. He’s got student loans to pay off. And he’s doing amazing work.

Mark Steyn prides himself on being a realist, on seeing through various hackneyed templates of events, and calling the world like it is. But, of course, he has his own exhausted templates, rooted in his own tired ideology. And so we come across this particular idiocy from his latest column:

Anyone who supports the launching of a war should be clear-sighted enough to know that, when the troops go in, a few of them will kill civilians, bomb schools, torture prisoners. It happens in every war in human history, even the good ones. Individual Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians did bad things in World War II and World War I. These aren’t stunning surprises, they’re inevitable: It might be a bombed mosque or a gunned-down pregnant woman or a slaughtered wedding party, but it will certainly be something.

This is true, so far as it goes. But Steyn does not grapple with the massive elephant in his living room. These kinds of atrocities happen even when a country commits itself to moral standards in warfare, even when its leaders at every level insist on following the Geneva Conventions. How much worse is war going to be when a country’s own leaders openly flout the Geneva Conventions, express contempt for them, and proudly violate the law of their own countries and the U.N. Convention against torture? Has this distinction between this war and every other war in American history been lost on Steyn? In Vietnam, American soldiers were court-martialed for "waterboarding" a detainee. In Bush’s administration, CIA officials are trained to do it, and medical professionals monitor the victims to ensure they are kept healthy enough for further torture. These facts are no longer in any dispute. When the president treats the enemy as animals, even when they are off the battlefield and can harm no one, why should his troops be held to a higher standard in the thick of grinding urban warfare, where the enemy is still at large?

And spare me this nonsense about knowing that torture will follow every war. If I had been informed in early 2003 that the liberation of Iraq would be conducted outside the Geneva Conventions, I could not have supported what would have been an unjust war in its execution. Period. If the president had been candid and explained that this war would require America to jettison its long history of humane detention policies and become a nation that practices and outsources torture, I would have been unable to support the war. Those of us who believe in the American tradition of humane warfare and in the moral boundaries of just warfare are not fair-weather hawks. We simply expected America to retain its honor in warfare. We were duped.

"This Haditha story, this Haditha incident, whatever, this is it folks, this is the final big push on behalf of the Democratic Party, the American left, and the Drive-By Media to destroy our effort to win the war in Iraq. That’s what Haditha represents ‚Äî and they are going about it gleefully. They are ecstatic about it … Folks, let me just put it in graphic terms. It is going to be a gang rape. There is going to be a gang rape by the Democratic Party, the American left and the Drive-By Media, to finally take us out in the war against Iraq. Make no bones about it," – Rush Limbaugh, yesterday.

"I think that it is perfectly fitting for us to use the United States Constitution, a document that is dedicated to the preservation of our inalienable rights, to tell a certain specific group of people what they cannot do, rather than tell the government what it cannot do.
We don’t need tax reform. We don’t need an end to earmark pork spending in Congress. We don’t need smaller government and school choice. We don’t need real reform that would put medical care back into the competitive marketplace. We need none of those things. All is fine! What we need is a Constitutional Amendment that will keep two people who love each other, but who we don’t consider to be normal – not by our standards anyway – to marry.
I know I’ll sleep better tonight." – Neal Boortz, yesterday.

"If you interpret the Constitution’s saying that the president is commander in chief to mean that the president can do anything he wants and can ignore the laws you don’t have a constitution: you have a king … They’re not trying to change the law; they’re saying that they’re above the law and in the case of the NSA wiretaps they break it," – Republican activist, Grover Norquist, in the New York Review of Books.

When I get a bunch of emails with the word ‘traitor" in the contents line, I usually check James Taranto’s blog to see what he’s saying about me now. He selects three citations from my blog in chronological order in order to insinuate that I always assume the worst about American soldiers and rush to judgment as to alleged war-crimes. He calls his item "selectively excitable." In fact, I held off comment on Haditha for weeks because we had no firm details, and my first reference, last May 31, offered context that spoke well of the soldiers in the unit. My reference to Ishaqi was also very careful:

Investigations continue, and exactly what happened has not been established. But the omens are grim. And these pictures of infants with bullet holes in their skulls simply defy my comprehension of what has happened to this country.

Given verified images of children with neat bullet holes in their skulls, it was indeed hard to believe the official U.S. version of the event, which was that the victims were killed by a collapsing house under fire. I did indeed find the military investigation a little dubious, but when they subsequently added the detail of a possible gun-ship being involved, I noted that new fact as soon as I discovered it, a few hours after my first mention. But I also absorbed the lesson of a reader:

As you said, we still need to find out more information about Ishaqi. But an AC-130 gunship obviously would have torn bodies apart, not put neat holes in the middle of foreheads.

My response to that was: "I don’t know what to think at this point." I still don’t – and that was my last statement on the matter, something Taranto selectively omits. My response on an hourly basis to new allegations and information inevitably means a changing judgment, based on new facts. But the notion that I have jumped the gun on these incidents, that I am selectively citing them because I am interested in impugning the integrity of the vast majority of servicemembers, and that I haven’t presented a wide array of views on them and cited the evidence in full, is patently unfair. If you selectively Dowdify anyone’s blog, you can insinuate anything. But the record shows I am only interested in finding out what happened, and making sure those responsible are held to account. It is tiresome to have to respond to allegations of being anti-American, but I’ve learned you have to answer, because over time, the smears can stick. And Taranto does very little but sneer and smear.