The Dish

The conservative mud-slinging continues.

THE LEFT AND BUSH: They’ll never admit it, but this president is the liberal left’s best friend in a long, long time. Yglesias tiptoes near the truth:

It would be a serious mistake to confuse Bush’s brand of big conservatism with liberalism, or with any kind of real concession to liberalism, but it suggests that the underlying political dynamics have shifted a great deal. If you did have a progressive president, there’s no longer a particularly large amount of popular resistance to expanding the activist state. Even most Republicans don’t especially care about small government.

See? Bush has redefined conservatism into meaninglessness by legitimizing massive government spending for social policy. The left will take the 35 percent spending increase and up it. Then they’ll raise taxes to pay for it. From their perspective, what’s not to like? The left-liberal project and the Bush-conservative project are essentially the same: use the state to control and direct the actions of the citizenry, and wean them onto government aid. The only difference is that the constituencies that are the beneficiaries of other people’s money are not identical; and the ideologies directing big government are not the same. I miss Clinton-Gingrich. It was, in retrospect, the high-water mark for conservatism as a governing philosophy.

It’s only logical for the Senate to question James Dobson, the evangelical Protestant who has a veto over White House social policy. And it will help moderate Americans better understand who really pulls the strings in the Republican party. Money quote:

Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said yesterday that his panel is likely to require Dobson and perhaps others to testify about such purported conversations. Asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” whether the committee will “bring some of these people who said they were told things that perhaps they shouldn’t have been told, like Mr. Dobson,” Specter replied: “my instinct is that they’ll be called. And the American people are entitled to clarification.”
Specter has expressed interest in Dobson’s comments before, but yesterday marked the clearest signal that the broadcaster may be required to face the 18-member committee in public.

The upcoming hearings (if we get that far) will be the best SCOTUS must-see TV since the Thomas circus. Get your popcorn ready.

THE COMING TAX HIKE: When it comes, remember who is responsible:

To date, the Bush administration has a disjointed, two-track budget policy. It has favored letting Americans keep more of their money via tax cuts while steadily building up the welfare state via unrestrained spending. Over time, that that strategy can’t work. As Milton Friedman and others have long argued, the size of government is found in its total spending and, ultimately, spending is a taxpayer issue. Higher spending and resulting deficits create a constant threat of higher taxes. It’s no surprise that not just Democrats but even moderate Republicans are now arguing that Bush’s recent tax cuts be allowed to expire.

Bush’s long-term legacy will be a much bigger welfare state and much higher taxes. He will have achieved what Ted Kennedy would never have gotten away with. Congrats, conservatives!

The Ugandan dictator and American president have one thing in common: they both back amendments to their countries’ constitutions to bar gay couples from marrying.

IN DEFENSE OF MILLER: Well, someone’s got to do it.

I’d like to be reassured about the potential effects of a bird flu epidemic, but count me in the still-panicky department. Fareed Zakaria rightly points out that new viruses – HIV among the most recent – often leap to humans during major population shifts. Today’s massive relocation of people and animals in China raises the odds of a new flu virus considerably. We are not doing anything nearly sufficient to prepare for a pandemic – either with the current bird flu strain or a future one. Money quote:

The total funding request for influenza-related research this year is about $119 million. To put this in perspective, we are spending well over $10 billion to research and develop ballistic-missile defenses, which protect us against an unlikely threat (even if they worked). We are spending $4.5 billion a year on R&D-drawings!-for the Pentagon’s new joint strike fighter. Do we have our priorities right?

We need some adjustment.

A DEPRESSING POLL: A British Defense Ministry poll of Iraqi attitudes suggests deepening hostility to coalition troops. Given their failure to provide even minimal security (which is not the troops’ fault, but their political masters’), this is fairly understandable. But worrying nonetheless.

The president’s tax reform commission proposes a one-page 1040-SIMPLE form. Nice work. I’ve long believed that simpler, flatter taxes are a potential vote-winner – as well as being good for the economy. If the president wants to re-boot his administration, real tax reform would be a good start.

In South Carolina, Republican voters are moving – away from Bush and in favor of John McCain. Six years too late. McCain-Rice 2008?

Judy Miller replies to yesterday’s Public Editor column. She basically calls Jill Abramson a liar. Byron Calame posts the full email on his public blog. Money quote:

You chose to believe Jill Abramson when she asserted that I had never asked her to pursue the tip I had gotten about Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger and his wife’s employment at the C.I.A. Now I ask you: Why would I – the supposedly pushiest, most competitive reporter on the planet — not have pushed to pursue a tantalizing tip like this? Soon after my breakfast meeting with Libby in July, I did so. I remember asking the editor to let
me explore whether what my source had said was true, or whether it was a potential smear of a whistleblower. I don’t recall naming the source of the tip. But I specifically remember saying that because Joe Wilson’s op-ed column had appeared in our paper, we had a particular obligation to pursue this. I never identified the editor to the grand jury or publicly, since it involved internal New York Times decision-making. But since you did, yes, the editor was Jill Abramson.

Obviously, Jill and I have different memories of what happened during that turbulent period at the paper. I did not take that personally, though she never chose to discuss with me our different recollections about my urging her to pursue the story. Without explanation, however, you said you believed her and raised questions about my “trust and credibility.” That is your right. But I gave my recollection to the grand jury under oath.

The hole Miller has dug just got a little deeper. (Hat tip: Petrelis. The intrepid blogger needs some cash to keep his blog alive.)

“The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney. I consider Cheney a good friend — I’ve known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore… I don’t think Dick Cheney is a neocon, but allied to the core of neocons is that bunch who thought we made a mistake in the first Gulf War, that we should have finished the job. There was another bunch who were traumatized by 9/11, and who thought, ‘The world’s going to hell and we’ve got to show we’re not going to take this, and we’ve got to respond, and Afghanistan is O.K., but it’s not sufficient.'” – Brent Scowcroft, in the new New Yorker.

Well … the question begged is whether Cheney was actually right, if he entertained those two possibilities. After 9/11, the cost-benefit analysis changed a little, didn’t it? Who would want to be the president who gambled (in retrospect, correctly, of course) that Saddam was no WMD threat, and then discovered that some terrorist detonated a Saddam-linked chemical weapon in a major U.S. city? Do you think that president would now be popular? It’s easy to know now, not so easy to have known for sure then. Scowcroft prides himself on always asking about the potential downside. Well, there wsa a pretty major potential downside of trusting Saddam Hussein in 2002. The question was never simply whether we knew the WMDs existed or not. The question was whether, without being able to know for sure, we could trust Saddam to keep such weapons away from terrorists. There’s a realist case for the Iraq war: that the risks of inaction were too high, and that the threat posed by the entire region demanded a radical departure from the acquiescence to autocracy of the past. Scowcroft’s hindsight is a little too easy. He should enjoy it while others deal with reality; and try to change the world for the better.

HOMECOMING QUEEN: In more ways than one.

“In their unseemly eagerness to assure Miers’s conservative detractors that she will reach the “right” results, her advocates betray complete incomprehension of this: Thoughtful conservatives’ highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution’s meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path that the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result.” – George F. Will, today. He’s been resplendent recently.

Why did Fitzgerald very quickly ensure that he could investigate obstruction of justice and perjury in his inquiry? Maybe one of his first witnesses provided an authoritative, over-arching story that was immediately contradicted by subsequent witnesses. Maybe contradictions began appearing almost immediately. Here endeth today’s piece of informed speculation.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “[O]ddly enough, the scriptures seem to be telling us, this is part of God’s gift to us. God intentionally chooses to be mysterious – for our sakes. If God were to be fully and completely revealed, if we were to see God beyond all hiddenness and mystery, our freedom would disappear. We would be forced to believe, forced to be obedient. No, this hiddenness is God’s blessing.
Certitude is a spiritual danger. If we claim to know God’s ways without question, we limit God to the shape of our own minds. As St. Augustine put it 1700 years ago, ‘If you think you understand, it isn’t God.’
One of the troubling currents of our time is the tendency of religious people to speak as if we have seen God’s face. A lot of what is being said in religious circles can suggest that some people claim to have God figured out, under control, in their pockets.” – The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, Dean of Washington National Cathedral. Without doubt, faith is not faith.

SONG FOR THE DAY: An unorthodox recording of “Oh, Holy Night.” No, it’s not Cartman.

MENSTRUAL BLOOD AND TARANTO: I think we have a new low in defenses of government-sanctioned abuse of prisoners. On Friday, WSJ blogger, James Taranto, tried to dismiss my ethical concerns about U.S. interrogators in Gitmo smearing fake menstrual blood on the faces of Muslim detainees. Taranto regards such techniques as “excellent.” My concern, along with that of many others within the military and CIA, is that this technique deliberately targets Islamic religious taboos, shocks the conscience and undermines the war by making us as religiously intolerant as the enemy. This story explains the rationale behind the technique:

Islam forbids physical contact with women other than a man’s wife or family, and with any menstruating women, who are considered unclean. “The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to [the interrogator who smeared fake menstrual blood on his face], he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength,” says the draft, stamped “Secret.”

Taranto endorses the use of a detainee’s religious faith against them, but then appears to dismiss that angle as unimportant. The only people who would find this tactic abhorrent, he argues, are

adult men who remain strangers to the female body. Among them are homosexual men who identify as gay at a young age and thus do not have heterosexual experiences. Also among them are single men from sexually repressed cultures, such as fundamentalist Islamic ones, in which contact between the sexes is rigidly policed.

So my own concern with religious abuse is dismissed as a function of my sexual orientation! I have to say that of all the sad attempts to dismiss or belittle abuse and torture of detainees, this has to be about the lowest and lamest yet. For the record, my objection is because we should not transform this war into one against all Islam. Abusing Islam in military prisons or on the battlefield is both immoral and deeply counter-productive. Using people’s religious conscience against them is a mark of totalitarian countries, not one where religious freedom is paramount. Taranto’s exclusion of gay men from the categories of adulthood and masculinity is also, shall we say, revealing. Has the pro-torture right really been reduced to this kind of irrelevant bigotry? Is this all they have left?