The Dish

“George Bush’s second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in 1804. The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.” – Mike Carlton, Sydney Morning Herald.

DOWDIFICATION WATCH: She’s up to her old tricks again. Greg Djerejian is on the case.

MADDEN WAS THE FIRST PICK: ABC’s first choice to appear in that now-infamous skit, in which Terrell Owens was hit on by Nicolette Sheridan in a towel, was John Madden, aging – and white – announcer. If Madden had indeed been in the skot, I bet it wouldn’t have provoked such outrage. Why? Because we wouldn’t have seen a sexual encounter between a powerful black man and a sexy white woman. Almost thirty years after Loving vs Virginia, inter-racial sex is still taboo in many parts of this country.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “You quote the speech at Mecca as part of a case for optimism about Islamic terrorism, and ask why it has not received more coverage. It has not received coverage because it is completely irrelevant to the issue of “Islamic terrorism”, if by that one means anything to do with 9/11, the Bali bombing, Zarqawi in Iraq, or anything else that might threaten the interests of western democracies. This Imam, in this pulpit, is a mouthpiece for the Saudi Royal family. They are trying to suppress the growing unrest in Saudi Arabia, some of which has taken the form of violence and terrorism. The Saudi regime is appallingly repressive and undemocratic, and is widely cited around the world as proof of Bush’s hypocrisy in claiming to be in favor of “freedom” and against “tyranny”. The fact is, the terrorists in Saudi Arabia are trying to dethrone a group of tyrants, i.e. the Saudi Royal family, that the U.S. has spent decades trying to keep in their thrones. Now the tyrants’ mouthpiece, i.e. the Grand Imam, says that *this* terrorism is bad, because it threatens the Saudi tyranny. That will not stop the Imam and his associates from spreading anti-western and anti-democratic messages all around Islam, and even encouraging further anti-western terrorism. To read his speech as some indication of a cooling-off in radical Islam’s infatuation with terrorism would be naive in the extreme.” More feedback on the Letters Page.

John Pike has a great comparison.

A DOLLAR CRASH? Dan Drezner parses a recent Financial Times headline. Check his comments section too. I have to say the FT is now such an Anti-American paper, I’m beginning to wonder if its financial reporting isn’t part of the bias.

National Review’s beloved John Derbyshire believes that Charles Graner’s ten-year sentence for serially beating up inmates to unconsciousness, overseeing rapes, forcing inmates to simulate sex acts, and all the other horrors I detailed this weekend in the New York Times, is “totally outrageous.” He favors a 30-day smack on the wrist. That kind of sentence amounts to an endorsement of Abu Ghraib. But then Derbyshire, at the time, wanted to join in. “Kick one for me.” Remember that NRO sees itself as a repository of “moral values.” One of those values, for one of its contributors, is a defense of Charles Graner.

Did he deceive the Senate on Bush’s DUI conviction? Isikoff reports.

Here’s some encouraging news, from a website that monitors Iran’s democratic opposition:

Reports from across Iran are stating about the massive welcoming of President George W. Bush’s inaugural speech and his promise of helping to bring down the last outposts of tyranny.
Millions of Iranians have been reported as having stayed home, on Thursday night which is their usual W.end and outgoing night, in order to see or hear the Presidential speech and the comments made by the Los Angeles based Iranian satellite TV and radio networks, such as, NITV or KRSI.
The speech and its package of hope have been, since late yesterday night and this morning, the main topics of most Iranians’ conversations during their familial and friendly gatherings, in the collective taxis and buses, as well as, among groups of young Iranians who gather outside the cities on the Fridays.
Many were seen showing the ” V ” sign or their raised fists. Talks were focused on steps that need to be taken in order to use the first time ever favorable International condition.

My own view is that a successful democracy in Iraq, and more speeches like the Inaugural, may be just as effective as military threats in the next few years in bringing the mullahs to heel. The secularism of Iraq’s Shia is also a great source of pressure.

The final word in the torture debate rightly belongs to Marty Lederman, who patiently dissects Heather Mac Donald’s latest brief for the administration and shows it to be … well, make your own mind up.

“I don’t just see light at the end of the tunnel, I see light at the start and throughout the tunnel,” – Mohammed Hanash Abbas, an Iraqi in Baghdad. If they can hope, why can’t we?

AND AT MECCA: The chief Imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Abdulrahman Al-Sudais, gives an annual sermon decrying extremism and terror. Money quote:

“Islam is the religion of moderation. There is no room for extremism in Islam,” he said. He called on Muslims to “protect non-Muslims in the Kingdom and not to attack them in the country or anywhere. Islam is a religion of peace that abhors attack on innocents.” Militants were using misguided interpretations of Islam to justify violence, he added. “Because Muslims have strayed from moderation, we are now suffering from this dangerous phenomenon of branding people infidels and inciting Muslims to rise against their leaders to cause instability,” Al-Sudais said. “The reason for this is a delinquent and void interpretation of Islam based on ignorance … faith does not mean killing Muslims or non-Muslims who live among us, it does not mean shedding blood, terrorizing or sending body parts flying.”

Is there some reason this didn’t get more play? It strikes me as important.

Critics of the president’s inaugural speech are, I think, misunderstanding it. It’s not a program; it’s not a New Year’s Resolution that will revolutionize America’s relationship with every major country. It was a thematic speech. That’s all. It’s an attempt to provide the president’s own melody to the chorus of his administration. A brief look at the Bush administration’s first four years does not reveal naive utopianism with regard to unfree countries. Fareed Zakaria usefully points this out:

The president said in his speech to the world’s democrats, ‘When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.’ But when democratic Taiwan stood up to communist China last year, Bush publicly admonished it, siding with Beijing. When brave dissidents in Saudi Arabia were jailed for proposing the possibility of a constitutional monarchy in that country, the administration barely mentioned it. Crown Prince Abdullah, who rules one of the eight most repressive countries in the world (according to Freedom House), is one of a handful of leaders to have been invited to the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. (The elected leaders of, say, India, France, Turkey and Indonesia have never been accorded this courtesy.) The president has met with and given aid to Islam Karimov, the dictator of Uzbekistan, who presides over one of the nastiest regimes in the world today, far more repressive than Iran’s, to take just one example.

And grown-ups – even idealistic grown-ups – know this is inevitable. The problem with Bush is not his ideals. It’s his ability to put those ideals into practice. In the series of screw-ups that was the Iraq war, Bush would have done better to think less about the idea of liberty and more about the nuts and bolts of how to build a nation. Just one.

BLOGGING FOR FREEDOM: A blog that keeps up with bloggers in unfree countries. Check it out.

WHATEVER, HE SMILED: When a sister loses her brother to AIDS, a world cracks. And now, a blog can express the grief and peer forward in hope. Hang in there, Lizzie. Keep the faith. Do you know Leonard Cohen’s song, “The Anthem”? It helped me get through my own AIDS deaths.

“In your TNR post on Larry Summer’s most recent public skewering for speaking a likely truth, you wrote that ‘Summers is putting his finger on one of liberalism’s great contemporary problems: how to reconcile the moral equality of human beings and the political equality of citizens with increasingly accurate scientific discoveries of aspects of human life that reflect our innate, biological inequality.’ Lincoln addressed this directly in his Springfield address of June 26, 1857 when he said:

In some respects she [a black woman] certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.

and

I think the authors of that notable instrument [the Declaration] intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’

Lincoln was addressing the widespread (and probably false) belief that variance in intelligence has a racial component, but the same reasoning can apply to the many other (probably true) biological differences we are discovering exist among human beings. That is, a Liberal would assert that, despite the obvious biological variation that exists among human beings, they share an essential equality that entitles them to equality in certain rights. This is, of course, exactly the idea you articulated in your TNR essay, but I thought you might enjoy finding its parent in Lincoln, if you weren’t already aware of it. I also think it’s interesting that Lincoln picked a black woman for his comparison, deliberately choosing the individual that the white men in his audience (the ones who could vote) would be least likely to see as their equal and least able to empathize with.” – More feedback on the Letters Page.

DOBSON VERSUS SPONGE-BOB: Why pile on? Here’s the best take. What’s interesting to me is that what Dobson is objecting to is not gay sex or gay relationships or gay identity, or any legislative or judicial proposal. What he objects to is tolerance of gay people, or teacjhing children that gay people deserve respect. That’s SpongeBob’s crime! Revealing, no? Now, recall that this man is the most powerful social conservative in Bush’s Republican party.

That VW ad is a hoax. A great one though. I thought no major corporation would have the balls to do it. Oh well.