The Dish

A fascinating exchange – here from Greg and here from Glenn, who seems to concede finally that he did indeed avoid a subject that needed urgent attention. Why? Because I irritated him. Oh, well. I wish I hadn’t, and my passion might have been misconstrued. I hope we can now draw this spat to a close, be glad that torture is now legally over, and argue again about how best to win the war we all want to succeed. Let me add that I have a lot of respect for Glenn, which is why I was so saddened by his treatment of this over the last year. But we agree on so much, I hope we can bury the hatchet on this and move forward.

“Re: the charge that you were “unspecific” on torture — you took an absolutist position (which I imagine even many of your supporters disagree with) against torture. That’s not unspecific. That’s as specific as you can get. If they mean unspecific as to your allegations, that’s also incorrect. You specifically referred them to specific government publications and other reports, and sometimes specifically excerpted from those reports.

Re: the charge that you were moralistic — I’d happily accept that one, Andrew. It’s to your credit that you were being moralistic about what’s a very moral issue on several different levels: the intrinsic immorality of torture (as Krauthammer also pointed out), the immorality of continuing to engage in a general pattern of behavior that most knowledgeable people (e.g. Sen. McCain) believe undermines both the national security and honor of the United States. Your antagonizers were in denial, and then blasé about it. You were moralistic, partly in response to their denigration and condescension. Now they’re cheering the result, which they did nothing to bring about and you did a lot to bring about. Please be proud, and get rip-roaring drunk this weekend if that’s your thing.”

A young black gay kid commits suicide at the age of thirteen. Like so many others, he had been psychologically and spiritually brutalized by his culture and his church and his society into a pit of self-doubt and despair. But now a friend rallies to his aid, and this poem, spoken aloud, is a cry for justice and compassion and truth. This despair is particularly deep among many African-American gay men and women – triply burdened – and still yearning to be free.

A case for lengthy wars.

THE BUYING OF INTELLECTUALS: This has to be a new nadir for the intellectual right.

The control-queen in the Vatican continues his harrassment of local churches who do not subject themselves to the full control of his acolytes. Excommunication is a major deal. And to do it over the question of controlling a parish’s finances?

You may have read the original Catholic News Service Review I linked to yesterday. Well, the Vatican was not pleased. And so the review has been changed. The rating given originally was “L” for “appropriate for limited adult audiences”. The new rating is “O” for morally offensive. The reviewer’s name has been taken off the review. The theocon website, a conduit for the most reactionary forces in the Church, i.e. Benedict, Neuhaus, et al., exults here. Here’s the old cache for the intellectually honest review. Here’s the censored one.

THE VATICAN AND BROKEBACK: You can see why this movie may pose a threat to Benedict’s anti-gay crusade. I haven’t seen it yet, alas, but just read the gut-wrenching and beautiful short story on which it’s based. It’s an astonishingly beautiful piece of writing. The story is about love: human love. Not homosexual love; or heterosexual love. Just love. And the immense psychic pain and cruelty inflicted on countless human beings for so many centuries because of whom they fell in love with. I haven’t seen the movie yet, because it hasn’t reached DC yet. But the story’s message is, to my mind, one of the more eloquent rebukes to the current Vatican. You know, the Vatican that speaks, at its most compassionate, of the “affliction” of “deep-seated homosexual tendencies.” Change one word and you see the truth the Church hierarchy refuses to see. How about “deep-seated homosexual love?” In Annie Proulx’s inspired story, that becomes something deeper and grander: “deep-seated human love.” That’s what the Pope is so afraid of. And why, in the end, he will lose this argument. Love and truth are on the other side of the debate. And our Catholic faith assures us that love and truth win in the end. Popes come and go; but the truth remains. And slowly, painfully, the truth is coming nout.

IS BUSH ABOVE THE LAW? It would appear so.

Last week, my other half and I rented the original King Kong, just to get a feel for the epic before Peter Jackson’s remake. The original was far better than I expected and heralded the beginning of Hollywood spectaculars and special effects. We saw Jackson’s Kong yesterday, and I have little doubt that the gloom-sayers about its box office prospects are wrong. It’s an astounding achievement of cinematography: more graphic, involving, spectacular and emotionally resonant than any movie of its kind ever made before. I’m not a huge fan of the big epics, or even CGI-dominated event movies. But this is different. Naomi Watts is gorgeous and vulnerable and credible; Jack Black is wonderfully, enthusiastically amoral; the beast itself a miracle of emotional expression without anthopomorphic distortion. It’s a tour de force. I predict that word of mouth will soon propel it to box office success. But then, I’m often wrong about these things.

“Is Reynolds kidding? Being unspecific is his entire M.O. His blog consists of little but broad agreements with the opinions of others (“indeed”) and vague endorsements of Rove and Bush-isms written in a passive voice (“if I were Rove I might not do ____”)
If anything, you’ve been irritatingly SPECIFIC on this subject, quoting endlessly from reports on torture, the McCain bill, etc.
I think you need to inaugurate the ‘Glenn Reynolds Unintentional Irony Award.'”

Heh.

Instapundit finds me “consistently, pompously, and annoyingly moralistic and irritatingly unspecific” on the question of torture. I’m sorry about that. But I can promise him my position had nothing to do with “brand differentiation,” as he calls it. Believe it or not, opposing torture was and is a deep principle of mine, sincerely held, and I think the record shows I blog according to what I think, even if it loses me readers and alienates people who would otherwise be allies. I’m sorry that Glenn, over the last year and half, said he opposed torture but did nothing to help stop it. In fact, he did much to excuse and ignore it or look the other way, as well as denigrating or condescending to those of us who fought against it. He even argued that vocally opposing torture would only help legalize it, because most Americans were in favor. Mercifully, the American people, as represented in the Congress, have proven him wrong. He lacked faith in American decency. Some of us didn’t.

FOR THE RECORD: And just for the record, let me correct one statment that Glenn has posted about my work on this issue. He has written that I “count” wrapping a Muslim in the Israeli flag or smearing fake menstrual blood on them “as torture,” and recently went further and cited my alleged “repeated treatment of those subjects as ‘torture.'” (My italics.) His evidence is the following sentence:

A simple question: after U.S. interrogators have tortured over two dozen detainees to death, after they have wrapped one in an Israeli flag, after they have smeared naked detainees with fake menstrual blood, after they have told one detainee to “Fuck Allah,” after they have ordered detainees to pray to Allah in order to kick them from behind in the head, is it completely beyond credibility that they would also have desecrated the Koran?

It seems clear to me that in that sentence, I distinguish between torture (which I use to describe actual murder) and other interrogation methods which are indeed “cruel, inhuman and degrading,” but not torture. All are banned under U.S. law and military code and the Geneva Conventions. But obviously, someone uttering “Fuck Allah!” – however depraved – is not torture, and I didn’t suggest it was. Ditto with the “fake menstrual blood” issue. Reynolds links to James Taranto’s ugly rants to back him up. Well go read the full evidence. Find one instance where I count fake menstrual blood as “torture,” let alone any “repeated treatment of those subjects as ‘torture.'” Even Taranto concedes I didn’t call it “torture.” He says I called it an “abuse” and described such tactics as “inhumane,” “immoral” and “disgusting”. I challenge Reynolds to cite one single instance where I “counted” such techniques as “torture.” It’s one more piece of flim-flam from the good professor to disguise his own sad failure to have the courage of his own alleged convictions. Sorry, Glenn. But the record speaks for itself.

A man says farewell to his soldier husband as he heads back to war.