The Dish

A reader forgives me:

I probably disagree with the majority of McCain’s positions, but I, too, found his commencement speech moving, inspirational and, above all, eloquent.  It was also full of the left’s supposed favorite thing:  nuance.
I do hope that McCain makes it past the primaries, if only to raise the quality of discourse.  The last election was a battle between Bush’s focus-group driven platitudes ("I’m a uniter, not a divider") and Kerry’s mealy-mouthed drivel ("I voted for it before I voted against it").  In sharp contrast to those two, McCain’s public statements are usually refreshingly direct, and his speeches address his audience as intelligent human beings rather than aggregations of polling data.
I don’t think you’re the only one on the right, left or center who’s hungry for a leader like McCain.  A little extra exuberance about genuine leadership can be excused, given that there’s so little of it in the current political milieu.

I have no way of verifying it, but that’s what Omar at Iraq The Model is saying. Money quote from a report in an Iraqi paper:

The Iraqi daily az-Zaman which is published in London and Baghdad quoted credible Iraqi sources as revealing that the IRGC had given al-Qaeda in Iraq, Strela-type SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles, modern explosives, and a large number of personnel arms including Kalashnikovs and BKC machineguns.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq is believed to be led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is on the United States’ wanted list.
The report said that representatives of al-Zarqawi’s group met in Beirut with members of the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah and through them established channels with Tehran.
Three close aides to al-Zarqawi travelled to Iran via a security checkpoint in the Iraqi border province of al-Amara from where they met with Iranian officials, the report added.

Why Iran would funnel support to people who target Iranian-allied Shiites is beyond me. Unless, perhaps, they fear that the Jihadist insurgency is fading, and that the new Maliki-led government has a chance at gaining legitimacy and support, while including Sunni Arabs. I don’t know, but this report surely deserves further inquiry from other media sources.

Let’s hope it doesn’t pan out.

An interesting split has opened up in the right-of-center blogosphere. Bainbridge stands his ground, for cogent reasons.

It seems a few professors at Patrick Henry College actually believed they should provide their students with a liberal education, and encourage open-ended questioning and dialogue. Er … wrong. Here’s the issue over which the fight ensued:

"There is much wisdom to be gained from Parmenides and Plato, as well Machiavelli and Marx," the professors wrote. "When we examine the writings of any author, professed Christian or otherwise, the proper question is not, ‘Was this man a Christian?’ but ‘Is this true?’"

The authors of those heretical sentences have either been fired or have quit. They seem not to understand that the core feature of Christianism is the submission of reason to ecclesiastical, Biblical or political authority.

"In politics, there are no right answers, only a continuing flow of compromises among groups, resulting in a changing, cloudy and ambiguous series of public decisions where appetite and ambition compete openly with knowledge and wisdom," former senator, Alan Simpson, in a recent speech.

"It takes a real man to confess Jesus as lord and savior. I’m not talking about no faggot or no sissy. Wait a minute! Let all the real men come on down here and take a bow. All the real men — I’m talking about the straight men. You ain’t funny, and you ain’t cranky, but you’re straight. Come on down here and walk around and praise God that you are straight. Thank him that you’re straight. All the straight men that’s proud to be a Christian, that’s proud to be a man of God," – Bishop Alfred A. Owens Jr., pastor of the 7,000-strong Greater Mount Calvary Holy Church, in Washington, D.C.

Marty Lederman connects the dots on the NSA surveillance program. Money quote:

The NYT story appears to have been leaked by those sympathetic to the NSA and General Hayden. The thrust of their account is that we should be grateful that the NSA surveillance is not much, much broader than has been; the only reason the program does not extend to surveilling purely domestic calls (rather than "merely" obtaining records of them) is that the NSA pushed back against Cheney and Addington.

A reader writes:

I read your post fawning over McCain. Haven’t you gone down this road before? I seem to remember in 2000, you fawned over a republican candidate for president who was going to heal the nation. You’re like the abused wife who keeps going back to her husband only to be abused again. Let’s face it, McCain is going to have to make peace with the evangelicals to get the Republican nomination. He is going to have to promise to support their reactionary agenda, which includes opposing gay rights and appointing conservative judges to the bench. So after two years of a McCain presidency, you will only be dismayed again.

Another chimes in:

Do you ever change? You could have written this boot-licking tribute to Dubya.  As a matter of fact, you probably did.