The Dish

Women are now 57 percent of all college students. I want to know why the left isn’t demanding affirmative action. I mean this is obvious sexism at work: anti-male sexism throughout the educational establishment. What else could explain, er, differences in test scores?

I’m not a lawyer and I’ve never been to law school. But even I know that there is no such thing as “the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause” as it relates to the Voting Rights Act. It appears that Harriet Miers is more clueless in this respect than I am. That is a very low bar for the Supreme Court. If this is the state of play, the hearings could be excruciating.

The DP already has the “Hung Up” song blasting through the apartment all day and half the night, and if it’s any indication of the rest of the album, it’s going to be superb. Madonna has always understood pop music in a way that most Americans don’t (I exclude gay men). By “pop,” I mean popular music that isn’t rock, country or hip-hop. So it’s unsurprising that the most ecstatic reviews for her new pop-dance album, “Confessions On A Dance Floor,” come from the culture that gets pop more than any other: Britain. We have almost a month more to wait?

“I was delighted today by your little plug for Futurama. Like you, I was never a big fan while it was on the air — never really paid much attention, actually. I was far more your standard Simpsons guy and Futurama just didn’t appear have the kind of zany, pop-culture-tweaking humor that I loved about the Simpsons (and whose writing has spiraled shamefully into total irrelevance the last few seasons). Futurama, like early-90’s Simpsons, was genius, and I love it more with every new episode I faithfully TIVO now. Fry and Bender are two of the most delightfully-written characters in TV and the senile malevolence of the Professor is up there as well.”

If you need further proof that this administration’s abandonment of clear Geneva guidelines has clearly undermined the war, then read this. The use of religion to taunt and torment the enemy has been going on for a long time now. From smearing inmates with fake menstrual blood, to desecrating the Koran, to forcing one Abu Ghraib prisoner to drink alcohol and eat pork, to burning Muslim corpses facing West … we now have a litany of abuses that are objectively evil and almost designed to lose us support among the broad Muslim population. And we have military academies that have been found to be over-run by religious zealots – and a leading general, Boykin, never disciplined for saying that ours is a war of the Christian God versus the Muslim God. When you do not stamp out religious bigotry at its base, when you give it a wink in politics and in warfare, you make these kinds of incidents inevitable. Pass the McCain Amendment.

I wondered what it might take for Hollywood types to take Islamic terrorism seriously. Maybe slitting a Buddhist monk’s throat and burning a temple will jolt them a little. (Hat tip: Judith.)

“Judy Miller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, and your job is to get her stories into the paper!” – Gerald Boyd, former managing editor of the NYT. That was his response to internal questions about Miller’s pre-war assertion that there were over 1,000 WMD sites in Iraq before the invasion.

Josh Marshall has a point here about apparent discrepancies in the president’s reported answers about Rove and Plamegate. Doesn’t he?

Who leaked them? Why? Wild but informed speculation here. My question: what did Fitzgerald know and when did he know it?

“‘What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret but far more telling to me is, America is paying the consequences.’ Mr Wilkerson, [a retired colonel who was chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January], said such secret decision-making was responsible for mistakes such as the long refusal to engage with North Korea or to back European efforts on Iran. It also resulted in bitter battles in the administration among those excluded from the decisions. ‘If you’re not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.'” – from the Financial Times today. Cabal? Powell’s top aide – who has distanced himself from Powell, but almost certainly reflectes his own views – also cites the abuse scandal as one of the consequences of the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis:

The detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was “a concrete example” of the decision-making problem, with the president and other top officials in effect giving the green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there unless you’ve condoned it.”

Condi is blamed for not intervening. But the president himself is the real man responsible. Now, the question is: what else did this cabal get up to? And is that what Fitzgerald is interested in? Did Fitzgerald talk to Wilkerson? Or Powell? The questions multiply. More here.