The Dish

“That’s what should make the spectacle of the past week so troubling to the Bush administration. It has depended on orthodoxy within the movement to suppress complaints. But now that discipline has broken down. The conservative movement increasingly resembles a dictator’s palace in the midst of a coup. Comrades have begun turning on one another with incredible fervor, as the widely ridiculed Bush apologist Hugh Hewitt will now surely attest. These days, you never know who will get dragged out and shot next. Since so many nagging complaints have festered for so long, it will surely get even uglier.” – Franklin Foer, at TNR, firewalled off from non-subscribers.

Bush continues to slide in every poll, with a post-Katrina acceleration downwards. Mystery Pollster examines the data.

Well, actually more than that. She would favor amending the federal constitution to ban all abortions, with the exception of the life of the mother. At least that was her position in 1989. That doesn’t mean that she’d vote for repeal of Roe, but it does help clarify things. For me, at least, a willingness to tamper with the Constitution itself to implement social policy is the opposite of any meaningful conservative philosophy. But, hey, that barn is already horse-free. Weirdly, I don’t think it will shore her up among the conservative establishment, who oppose her for her mediocrity, primarily. But it might generate enthusiasm from the religious base, and thereby galvanize the left, which, in turn, may solidify the right. I’m still a wait-and-see-er. The hearings are necessary. But it’s fascinating to see so many fissures on all sides developing.

Last night’s Colbert Report, of course. O’Reilly fileted. My only worry is: how can he keep it up?

“I just need to tell our story since you asked the question “how can abortion not always be wrong?”
My wife and I decided to try for our second baby on December 29, 2002. I happen to remember the date because it was our fifth wedding anniversary. We were amazingly fortunate the first time we wanted to have a baby, as she became pregnant in the second month of trying.
On January 24, 2003, she was diagnosed with lung cancer just three weeks after her 30th birthday. She went for a routine doctor visit and expected to be sent to an allergist because we had just moved into the middle of the East Texas pine forests. Instead, a chest x-ray led to this horrible diagnosis.
In the aftermath of the diagnosis, she did not menstruate. She was always very regular, and we didn’t think much about it until it became six days, then seven, then ten. On the eleventh day she did. To this day, I do not know whether she was pregnant and the stress of the situation caused her to miscarry, or whether the stress just threw off her cycle.
But for a week we sat in a limbo of not knowing, of not knowing what even to hope for. I don’t know what we would have decided to do, whether we would have postponed chemo and radiation long enough for her to have the baby or whether we would have had an abortion. She died on March 28, 2004, and as much as I would love to have another living monument to her life, I know I couldn’t have raised a newborn without her.
We were mere days from having to make a decision about abortion, and I don’t think we would have been wrong in any choice we would have made. I had always been pragmatically pro-choice, but that episode of my life just confirmed to me that just as we didn’t need someone else at our table helping us make this decision, I don’t want to be at someone else’s table either.
So I guess this is a long answer to how abortion can not always be wrong.”

The former general and secretary of state strongly backs the McCain Amendment banning abuse and torture of detainees:

KING: We’re back with General Powell, touching a few bases. We hope to have him on quite a bit to talk about a lot of his endeavors.

You publicly broke with the administration earlier this year, supporting Senate amendment 1977, the treatment of detainees. How is that coming along, by the way?

POWELL: Well, I wrote a letter supporting Senator McCain’s amendment. And the day the letter hit, the Senate voted on it and they passed that amendment 90-9. And I think that’s a pretty strong statement on the part of the Senate. And I hope the House responds accordingly.

All that amendment asks for is for American soldiers to follow the Army Field Manual. The field manual contains our doctrine and the way we’re supposed to behave. It’s our doctrine.

(CROSSTALK) POWELL: I have no idea why they would be against it, but the president is against it and the administration is against it because they think it will constrain them in some ways with respect to, I guess, interrogation of detainees.

But we have such a problem in this regard that I think it’s important that the Congress take a stand on this. Congress, under the Constitution, Article I, Section 8, is the body that makes laws and regulations governing the armed forces. They’re not telling the administration what to put in this field manual.

They’re saying, if it’s a field manual and it’s guidance to the troops, what’s wrong with the United States Congress also endorsing that? And so I hope that the amendment does pass either in the defense authorization or the appropriation bill.

Did you hear that, Senators Allard and Inhofe?

“Earlier this year, I received notice that my dues for the District of Columbia Bar were delinquent and as a result my ability to practice law in D.C. had been suspended. I immediately sent the dues in to remedy the delinquency. The nonpayment was not intentioned, and I corrected the situation upon receiving the letter.” – Harriet Miers. Ryan Lizza removes the “details-oriented” qualification from the list.

I cannot say I’m surprised. Bruce Bartlett is an actual fiscal conservative. He has principles. His loyalty is to his ideas, not to the conservative intelligentsia’s think-tank welfare-state. If I were him, I’d be delighted to be fired for dissent. It’s good publicity for his book; and a sign of his integrity. Memo to Bruce: get a blog. The pressure for herd mentality is less intense when you’re in pajamas in the home office; and you don’t have to hide your contempt for the sell-outs and suck-ups who walk by your office every day.

REYNOLDS NAILS IT: I think Instapundit gets to the core of the Miers problem here:

Despite charges of cronyism, Ms. Miers is not simply the president’s crony, but his lawyer — formerly his personal attorney, and now his presidential attorney. This has already given rise to paranoid theories from the left to the effect that Mr. Bush is trying to protect himself from prosecution growing out of the Plame affair or the Iraq war. These theories are unlikely, not least because Ms. Miers’s current position would probably disqualify her from hearing precisely those kinds of cases. And even if she were not disqualified, there might be doubts about her objectivity that would undermine the court’s reputation.

What if Clinton had appointed David Boies to the court? More to the point: I’m not sure the worries from the paranoid left are entirely misplaced. From all I hear, Miers was hardly unaware of the decision to torture detainees and certainly knows a huge amount about the decision by the White House to upend decades of clarity on the matter. Putting her on the court is one way of keeping her – and what she knows – beyond public scrutiny.

Here’s a touching piece that cuts to the core of why abortion is, in my view, morally wrong. Money quote:

In ancient Greece, babies with disabilities were left out in the elements to die. We in America rely on prenatal genetic testing to make our selections in private, but the effect on society is the same.
Margaret’s old pediatrician tells me that years ago he used to have a steady stream of patients with Down syndrome. Not anymore. Where did they go, I wonder. On the west side of L.A., they aren’t being born anymore, he says.

We have real debates about sex-selection abortion; if we ever find a gay gene, you can be sure much of the next generation of homosexuals will be aborted; but today, the silent abortion of countless potential human beings who have Down Syndrome is barely discussed. It should be. Note that I’m not saying here that all abortion should be illegal. I’d vote for a law that kept it legal in the first trimester to protect a woman’s ownership of her own body and for pragmatic reasons; and I think majorities in most states would agree, if allowed a vote. But it is always wrong. How can it not be?

Here’s Senator Inhofe’s explanation of his vote to keep torture as an option for the U.S. military:

I understand your concerns and I want to make it unequivocally clear that I do not condone torture. I believe that torture is abhorrent, inexcusable, and unbecoming of a great nation such as ours. Furthermore, torturing captured enemy combatants has proven to produce intelligence that is unreliable. I believe that our soldiers should have the highest standards reasonably allowed and uphold the values that we all, as Americans, share. If any soldier does not measure up to these standards, they should be dismissed from service and anybody who tortures captives should be fully prosecuted.

I voted against Senator McCain’s amendment to the FY 2006 Department of Defense Appropriations because I believe that the amendment is a mistake. Senator McCain’s amendment would put into code our interrogation tactics. We learned from Al-Qaeda training manuals, that Al-Qaeda had learned about our interrogation tactics and were training their terrorists about how to defeat them. This makes the interrogator’s job of obtaining useful and reliable intelligence from captured terrorists much more difficult because the greatest aid to an interrogator is the fear of the unknown. This is why I believe that we should keep our interrogation tactics classified so that other groups are not able to copy what Al-Qaeda did.

Er, Senator, the Army Field Manual 34 – 52, which McCain wants to codify in law, is already public. The amendment only makes clear what is already banned and in the public domain. Nothing classified is revealed. The amendment would allow the Pentagon to improvise within these clear guidelines, and the DoD could also classify certain sections if it wanted to. But, yes, enemy combatants would know that the U.S. won’t abuse, degrade or torture them if captured. They would know that America is better than Saddam or any other Arab dictatorship. Does Inhofe have a problem with that?