The Dish

Here they are. One the NYT will print. The other it won’t. You find some rational criterion for the decision.

This is a pretty pathetic comment:

"When you bring it out early, you are going to leave it open for the spinmeisters in Rove’s machine, the Republican side, to tear it to pieces," said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois.

Let me find that tiny violin. It’s around here somewhere. I’m not a Democrat and don’t think I ever could be, but here’s what I’d say if I were in opposition right now. These guys are corrupt and incompetent. They have screwed up the Iraq war, turned FEMA into a joke and landed the next generation with a mountain of debt. We’re for making the homeland safer, winning back our allies, and taking on the Iranian dictatorship. We’re for energy independence, universal healthcare and balancing the budget again. Now, let Rove do his worst. Hey, we need Democrats who relish the fight, not timid ones who cower at the prospect. Bring back the happy warriors. Please.

"You know that those cartoons were published for the 1st time months ago and we here in the Middle East have tonnes of jokes about Allah, the prophets and the angels that are way more offensive, funny and obscene than those poorly-made cartoons, yet no one ever got shot for telling one of those jokes or at least we had never seen rallies and protests against those infidel joke-tellers.

What I want to say is that I think the reactions were planned to be exaggerated this time by some Middle Eastern regimes and are not mere public reaction. And I think Syria and Iran have the motives to trigger such reactions in order to get away from the pressures applied by the international community on those regimes." – the indispensable Omar, at Iraq the Model.

This is a riveting debate on the whole cartoon issue between my friend, Irshad Manji, and As’ad AbuKhalil, professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. Her website is here. His is here. I have yet to find an opponent of Jyllands-Posten’s decision to publish the cartoons who is prepared to defend the mob violence and intimidation that has ensued. What I find instead is a mealy-mouthed equation between "extremists on both sides." I find the equivalence troubling. There is simply no equivalence between people who merely want to publish and people who use the veiled threat of violence to intimidate them. But I have learned one thing: I wasn’t as aware as I should have been of the razor-edge sensitivity of many Muslims to any depiction of their faith that is not completely orthodox. All I can say is that a self-confident faith is not this defensive and touchy. It can and must brush off provocation, or be consumed by it. Whem more Muslims can look at a banal cartoon of Muhammad with the same equanimity that most Catholics experience when viewing South Park’s bleeding Virgin Mary, we will live in a calmer, safer world.

New York Press’s entire editorial staff just quit, after the publisher refused to print the Danish cartoons. Wow.

How do you find a Danish flag to burn in Gaza? Some Muslim entrepreneurs have led the way.

Jack Balkin saves you from reading the transcript of the AG’s defense of illegal wire-tapping. Here’s the synopsis:

"What we did was legal, or, in our opinion, could have been legal. Since there are arguments on both sides, we will rely on our opinion. However, we won’t let a court decide the question, because then we wouldn’t be able to rely on our own opinion.

We won’t answer hypothetical questions about what we can do legally or constitutionally. We also won’t tell you what we’ve actually done or plan to do; hence every question you ask will about legality be in effect a hypothetical, and therefore we can refuse to answer it."

Simple, really.

I’ll be on Anderson Cooper’s show again tonight, debating the cartoon issue. Around 10 pm, they tell me.

A group of Muslim youth in Denmark and Norway renounce the violence of others. This is a good sign – one of several emerging in Europe’s Muslim population – who are often themselves the targets of Islamist intimidation and violence.

Dan Savage notices a poster that just went up in a very liberal neighborhood. I think the American right and left can and should unite over this – and defend freedom against intimidation.