The Dish

Max Boot has great fun jousting at straw men today. Well, not entirely straw men. The paranoid far left might indeed think there’s a Nixonian plot to listen in on their phones for purely political reasons. That’s not my point. I don’t see why we can’t monitor al Qaeda this way and follow the law, that’s all. If we need to finesse the law, fine. One other critical point. Oversight helps identify errors and mistakes. It’s a small insurance policy to avoid self-inflicted black eyes. And it’s not as if this administration hasn’t given itself a few. Too little secrecy can hurt us. So can too much.

Every now and again on the Dish, I link to something purely because it cheered me up. It’s gray and pelting with rain in New York City where I just woke up. But the thought of watching William Shatner channel Elton John drives the clouds away.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that good news about epidemics rarely make it into the mainstream media. They like their viruses lethal, their transmission rates soaring, their death rates climbing. That’s why you probably won’t read the following fact in many other places. In the last year, diagnoses of AIDS in San Francisco plummeted another 60 percent from record lows. Deaths dropped to a new low as well. That doesn’t mean that HIV transmission is down – but the signs are good there as well. Nor does it mean that AIDS among the poor and mainly black doesn’t remain a huge problem. But what was once the epicenter of the plague has long since ceased to be so. Two cheers.

No one was more prescient than Jim Fallows about the Iraq war and what it would entail. All the more reason to look back and see what he foresaw about U.S. policy toward Iran.

More disturbing details are emerging of how the president seems to regard the law as an optional obligation in the discharge of his duties. Please don’t confuse my concerns with a belief that the president should be hampered in fighting terrorism. He shouldn’t. We need his vigilance and energy. But there are also basic legal oversight provisions that help ensure that power is not abused; and that the public can have confidence in the president’s war-making powers. This president, alas, has systematically ignored the legal safeguards – again in signing statements. Eric Umansky has the latest goods.

I was braced, of course. But the emails are running almost ten-to-one in favor of the new site format. Still, this is the Dish, so the critics gets the first lick:

Yikes … hate the new look!  I loved your white words against that deep purple … the whole feel or your new location seems so much like all the other nondescript blogs out there … complete with the cartoon charicature! 
I know you are with TIME, (which is also kinda creepy) but I hope you alter your site back to the way it looked before, or at least make it look remotely like the old one.

Sorry, bro. We changed for a reason. But these guys may be onto something:

Decent redesign, nice caricature but man, it takes forever to load.

I’ve asked them to look into it. Let me know if problems persist. Praise last:

Congratulations on what appears to be a seamless move to your new online home.  I’m sure you will get many thanks from those who couldn’t handle the white-on-blue from your former site (I’m not one of them); that aside, the layout looks very good, and I had no problems navigating the site.  Even the cartoon is good — the face is recognizably yours, especially the eyes — but I do wonder about the little lines surrounding your left hand.  Are they supposed to indicate motion, the onset of pain, or an incipient burst of energy or magic?

Fairy dust, obviously. Now for an excerpt from Vanity Fair’s letters page:

I LOVE your new website!  I didn’t realize what I’d been missing until I saw your new one!

Thanks. But the really gratifying emails come from those of you who’ve been with me since the very beginning, five and a half years’ ago:

I just wanted to drop you a note to say that I am loving your new format. Andrewsullivan.com has been part of my daily online readings since I came across your site several years ago, and the new version is clear and easy to navigate. Thanks for keeping up the blogs.

Thanks for reading. And keep all the input coming.

Never, ever under-estimate the stupidity of people in government. In a new lawsuit designed to find out if the Bush administration has been secretly wire-tapping – without warrants – American citizens, a few NSA suspects are alleged:

Also named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit are the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has written in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; Barnett R. Rubin, a scholar at New York University who works in international relations; Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect; the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; Greenpeace, the environmental advocacy group; and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Islamic advocacy group.

Hitch? Say it ain’t so, King George!

Ted Kennedy discovers he’s Samuel Alito. With better hair.

I just read Fred Barnes’ new bio of the president. It’s worth a read, if only to look into what a full-bored defense of everything Bush has done, thought, believed or even sneezed amounts to. A couple of points. Fred writes about the Washington establishment in exactly the same terms he was writing about it in the 1980s – as a liberal monopoly. This from someone on the biggest cable news channel, surrounded by the vast K-Street-GOP nexus, with Republicans controlling House, Senate, White House and a majority on the Supreme Court. Hey, Fred, you are the establishment now. Second, Fred breezily dismisses any dissension on the right. In this book, "there’s no paramount national issue that splits Republican ranks." Immigration, abortion, spending, states’ rights, civil liberties, torture, pork, executive power, debt, Medicare expansion: these don’t count. Fred can even quote the president as follows with not a trace of irony:

"America will always stand firm for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits on the power of the state …"

This from a president who has authorized the torture of military detainees, retains the right to disobey laws he signs, and orders warrantless wire-tapping of American citizens. There may be a defense of these actions, but Fred doesn’t even acknowledge that some conservatives are queasy about them.

But the best quote in the book comes from Condi Rice. She said these words in her Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of state:

"The world should apply what Natan Sharansky calls the ‘town square test’: if a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society."

By that measure, alas, Iraq is still a fear society, interspersed by anarchy and terror, with merely the promise of freedom. I still feel that liberation from Saddam was a necessary, noble, important act. But, as Hobbes fully understood, there can be no freedom if there is no order. And Bush ensured that order would never be imposed in Iraq, because he persistently refused to send sufficient troops to provide it. That’s the tragedy we now face; and the past mistake we have now somehow to rectify.