The Dish

It isn’t going away.

I’ve criticized the title of Ramesh Ponnuru’s new book, "The Party of Death" as being too overtly partisan, bringing political rhetoric on difficult moral questions down to Coulteresque levels. Ponnuru insists that he is being bipartisan in the book. Here’s an extract from an interview on NRO:

Lopez: You make clear in the book that the "party of death" in the title is not the Democratic party. Plenty of Republicans are members. But the Dems have embraced it with open arms, so aren’t they kinda sorta the party of death, or its main political manifestation?

Ponnuru: One of the stories the book tells is how abortion transformed the Democratic party from a party primarily concerned about protecting the weak to one that is more avid about defending the alleged rights of the strong. Pro-life Democrats have resisted this transformation, but it is certainly true that the Democratic party has become the party of unrestricted abortion, lethal research on human embryos, and euthanasia. The way I put it is that the party of death has largely taken over the Democratic party and has an outpost in the Republican party too.

Here’s what the inside flap of the book says:

Is the Democratic Party the "Party of Death"?

If you look at their agenda they are.

IT‚ÄôS NOT JUST abortion-on-demand. It’s euthanasia, embryo destruction, even infanticide‚Äîand a potentially deadly concern with "the quality of life" of disabled people. If you think these issues don‚Äôt concern you ‚Äî guess again. The Party of Death could be roaring into the White House, as National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru shows, in the person of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In The Party of Death, Ponnuru details how left-wing radicals, using abortion as their lever, took over the Democratic Party — and how they have used their power to corrupt our law and politics, abolish our fundamental right to life, and push the envelope in ever more dangerous directions. In The Party of Death, Ponnuru reveals:

* How Hillary Clinton could use the abortion issue (but not in the way you think) to become president * Why the conventional wisdom about Roe v.Wade is a lie * How the party of death ‚Äî a coalition of special interests ranging from Planned Parenthood to Hollywood ‚Äî came to own the Democratic Party * How the mainstream media promotes the party of death * Why Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, and other leading liberals gave up being pro-life * How liberals use animal rights to displace human rights * The Democratic presidential candidate who said that infanticide is a mother’s "choice" * How doctors‚Äîand other health care professionals‚Äîare being coerced, by law, into violating their consciences * The ultrasound revolution: why there’s hope to stop the party of death.

Hmmm. No mention of the Republican party at all. Complete identification of the "party of death" with one party. Ponnuru gets a veto on the dust-jacket. His attempt to have it both ways is, at the very least, disingenuous.

This email strikes me as on the money:

I’ve taken to listening to BBC radio 4 podcasts. What is interesting is the comparison between England and Canada. Canada had a fiscally-responsible centrist party running the show for a decade or more under Cretien. They starting getting lazy and corrupt. Cretien stayed on power two years too long and his finance-minister successor was heading a party that "needed to lose". The Conservatives managed to rebrand themselves as a center-right rather than right party and now Stephen Harper is Canada’s Conservative PM.
Blair and his party have gotten lazy (no corruption like the Liberal corruption in Canada) and Blair is staying too long. The Chancellor who will succeed him is losing his time to undo the laziness in the party. By the time he gets power Labour will "need to lose". Cameron is rebranding the Tories as a center-right party.
Prediction based on Canada: Brown’s Labour will form an unstable minority government after the next election and will then lose after a year or so when Cameron will win a small majority/large minority.

Many of you have pointed out that Ray McGovern, the man who challenged Rumsfeld in public, holds some wacko views, and has made some arguably anti-Semitic statements. It seems my description of him as not being a "crazed lefty" was wrong on at least one count. But then this administration has turned many previously sane, moderate people into those who want to scream at the dishonesty and incompetence of their own government. What interests me is that no one has denied that McGovern was indeed the man who used to brief the president’s own father on intelligence, and that, in the exchange in question, it is now clear that he was right and Rumsfeld wrong. Here is a transcript of the exchange between Rumsfeld and McGovern. The precise point at issue is whether Rumsfeld had categorically stated that there were WMDs in Iraq. Money quote:

RUMSFELD: [I]t appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.

McGovern: You said you knew where they were.

RUMSFELD: I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were and we were … just … (crosstalk)

McGovern: You said you knew where they were Tikrit, Baghdad, northeast, south, west of there. Those are your words.

RUMSFELD: My words … my words were that … no, no, no wait a minute, wait a minute. Let him stay one second. Just a second.

Here’s the transcript to which McGovern was referring:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think — let me take that, both pieces — the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

That’s pretty categorical to me. Let’s say it was an honest mistake. Has Rumsfeld ever apologized for unwittingly misleading the American public in the beginning of a war? He subsequently cites one facility in the Kurdish area where he suspects WMDs might already have been looted by Jihadists or Saddamites. Why? Because we never sent enough troops to secure the WMDs the war was supposed to take out. In fact, for months, many key weapons sites were left to be looted by the insurgents we are now fighting. This is one mystery I’ve never been able to understand. We were told the war was to prevent WMDs from getting into the hands of terrorists; and yet the war-plan, with its extremely light force-structure, was designed almost to ensure that such WMDs could be easily given to terrorists by a regime that no longer had anything to lose. Can anyone explain that? Was Rumsfeld so wedded to his ideology that he stuck to it even when it violated the entire point of the war? With Rumsfeld, it would not surprise me. Then there’s this revealing exchange from the same show:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you think we’ll still be fighting in Iraq six months from now?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, goodness, you know, I’ve never — we’ve never had a timetable. We’ve always said it could be days, weeks, or months and we don’t know.

No time-table; no plan; no contingencies. Yet we risked everything. Fire Rumsfeld Now.

The New Republic on Darfur.

It’s painful to read the following:

The torture convention outlaws all forms of torture and inhumane treatment whatever the circumstances, forbids sending people to countries where they risk torture, and requires prosecution and punishment of all those responsible for torture up the chain of command.
In a report to the committee this week, UK-based Amnesty International said there was evidence of ‘widespread torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees’.
It accused Washington of creating a climate in which torture and ill-treatment could flourish, by trying to narrow the definition of torture and failing to hold senior officials responsible.
Jennifer Daskal, US advocacy director of Human Rights Watch in New York, said yesterday that senior US officials were still refusing to classify ‘water-boarding’ ‚Äì a near-drowning technique used in the Spanish Inquisition ‚Äì as torture.

Can some journalist with some balls simply ask Rumsfeld or Rice or Cheney or Bush up-front whether they believe "waterboparding" amounts to "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of detainees? We deserve an answer.

The WSJ has the money quote:

Neither Mr. Goss, 67 years old, nor President Bush, who accepted the resignation during a brief White House announcement Friday, gave any reason for the surprise exit. (Read the full text of their statements.) But it comes after the once highflying agency has been eclipsed in the post-9/11 shake-up of the intelligence community and the creation of a White House-based National Intelligence directorate under John Negroponte that had sapped power from the Central Intelligence Agency chief. More recently, the agency has been rocked by a controversy over intelligence leaks.

The agency also has been drawn into a federal investigation of bribery that has sent former Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham to prison. Just this past week, the CIA confirmed that its third-ranking official, a hand-picked appointee of Mr. Goss, had attended poker games at a hospitality suite set up by a defense contractor implicated in the bribing of former Rep. Cunningham. Friday, people with knowledge of the continuing Cunningham inquiry said the CIA official, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, is under federal criminal investigation in connection with awarding agency contracts.

Dusty Foggo. Tom Wolfe, are you now scripting reality?

Not some crazed lefty. The man who demanded that Rumsfeld answer the questions we all want to have answered turns out to be the man who gave former president George H. W. Bush his daily intelligence briefing. And he was right in the exchange; and Rummy was factually wrong. Yep: Rumsfeld lied. Quelle surprise.

The data are really quite remarkable. Here are two graphs, cited by Mark Blumenthal and created by Charles Franklin here and here.

Then there’s this downhill slalom:

Franklin comments:

I was frankly shocked at the above results. Other presidents have suffered low approval ratings, and President Bush still stands above the lows of four of the ten other post-war presidents. But I had not appreciated how much the current approval is below other mid-term approval ratings, even without extrapolating current trends. We have simply never seen a president this unpopular going into a midterm election.
I will be surprised if the current rate of decline continues. But I will also be surprised by a sustained upturn at the rate of November-January. Either would be an extreme outcome. But approval between the upper 20s and lower 30s seems entirely plausible. There is no precedent for a midterm with approval at those levels.

I’m predicting that the Democrats will win back both Houses this fall. Of course, no one should under-estimate the idiocy and incompetence of the Democratic party. But they have stiff competition on both those fronts these days.

It tells you not much. The full background on Hookergate, in which Goss, or his staffers, may be embroiled, is here. Republican spin can be found here. I find it underwhelming. The suddenness of this departure, its Friday afternoon timing, and the absence of any obvious cause suggests there is more to emerge. My sources tell me: much more.