The Dish

The new claim is that the United States’ occupation of Iraq has led to 300,000 Iraqi deaths. Tom Elia elaborates.

The heterosexuals, of course! Stephanie Coontz will find few dissenters on the social right. The revolution in civil marriage – in which it became about love, not property, in which women and men were equal, in which children were not necessary – all occurred before the gay revolution. Since marriage has already been redefined to make the exclusion of gays logically absurd, the campaign against letting gays into the human family necessarily raises the suspicion of mere animus. It’s not bigotry to say that these are the rules that govern civil marriage and too bad if you can’t live up to them (i.e. procreation, or traditional gender roles). But it is suspicious when you abolish all those rules for straights and then use the old rules to bar gays. I don’t see how gay marriage opponents manage to get round the logic of this – except by resorting to purely religious arguments (which would invalidate most heterosexual marriages today as well), or simply reiterating the definitional case that marriage is for straights, dammit. This glaring hole on the argument must have something to do with the fact that an idea that was novel in the 1980s is now the law in several civilized countries and one state in America. Reason eventually finds a way.

FRUM ON MIERS: Another cold day in hell, but I think David Frum has a point on Harriet Miers. In my occasional interactions with the Bush brigade, I have discovered she is revered as well as feared. Not much of a paper trail; but hard as nails.

“I stand up and challenge them when they say things that are anti-gay. I haven’t given up on them yet,” – Luis Ibarcena, a 32-year-old Spanish security guard, on why he still attends mass, despite now being married to his husband.

JOHNNY APPLE DOES MY HOME COUNTY: I grew up in the rural idyll of West Sussex. Gardening was the religion. The NYT’s Johnny Apple regularly eats and drinks his way through much of it each summer. Enjoy. He sure does.

More information on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new president of Iran and a theocratic criminal of epic proportions.

Another case for the miraculous work of profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies.

It’s extremely frustrating that the New Yorker hasn’t made Jane Mayer’s superb reporting on the use of medical doctors to facilitate and monitor abuse of detainees at Gitmo avilable online. But the detail and scope and meticulousness of the piece make it must-reading for those concerned about what is going on in U.S. military detention centers across the world. Gitmo, however disturbing its methods, is almost certainly the best run and least abusive of such centers. Mayer’s key point is that the military has redeployed its own training for resistance to enemy torture into a blue-print for inflicting torture on “illegal combatants” at Gitmo and elsewhere. The cooperation of military doctors, monitoring exactly how far a detainee can be physically and psychologically pushed until he dies, is about as unethical a process as can be imagined. But it’s yet another one of George W. Bush’s innovations in American warfare. What I also found fascinating was Mayer’s account of some of the techniques U.S. troops are trained to withstand – a program known as SERE: “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape.” One of them was trashing of the Bible, as a way to unsettle and destabilize the psyches of prisoners. Sound familiar? One graduate recalled:

“One of the most memorable parts of the camp experience was when one of the camp leaders trashed a Bible on the ground, kicking it around etc. It was a crushing blow, even though this was just a school… [T]he Bible trashing happened when this guy had us all in the courtyard sitting for one of his speeches. They were tempting us with a big pot of soup that was boiling – we were all starving from a few days of chow deprivation. He brought out the Bible and started going off on it verbally – how it was worthless, we were forsaken by this God, etc. Then he threw it on the ground and kicked it around. It was definitely the climax of his speech…”

Gee, I wonder why there was an alleged mass suicide attempt by Muslim prisoners at Gitmo in August 2003 to protest systematic abuse of the Koran in interrogation techniques. One such incident, denied by the Pentagon, was one in which the text was “allegedly wrapped inside an Israeli flag and stomped on.” I wonder where on earth one American trainer of prison guards gave an affidavit where s/he informed an interrogator at Abu Ghraib: “I told him of a story of an interrogator using and Pride and Ego Down approach. The interrogator took a copy of the Koran and threw it on the ground and stepped on the Koran, which resulted in a detainee riot.” I guess that since the Koran is treated with the utmost respect at Gitmo, all these things are simply invented by enemy propaganda and stab-in-the-back lefties. Just a few bad apples – with meticulous, and completely coincidental, legal cover from the White House memos.

It’s July Fourth, a day to reaffirm life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. My NPR essay can be read here.

Just walking through Provincetown this glorious afternoon, I came across a small house festooned with flags. The pic here is just of a flower box on the picket fence. As I was leaving, a woman came home and thanked me for photographing her house. We talked briefly. Her son has been in Iraq, and is now stateside training more soldiers for their tour of duty before returning himself. He was home last July Fourth; and his mom told me that yesterday as the ferry came in, she momentarily hoped he might be on it. He wasn’t.

Here’s to all like him, serving us right now, enabling the freedom we celebrate, the flags we fly.

A summary of his record on abortion and affirmative action. I doubt Bush will nominate someone the hard right will go nuts over and who would raise the entire question of government-sanctioned torture again. But it’s worth looking at the paper trail.

The always-valuable Jeffrey Rosen summarizes the post-O’Connor options.