The Dish

Glenn does his best, but it’s not terribly effective. We are almost two years into a conflict and critical defense weaponry is not available to soldiers who might die needlessly as a result. This is not that complicated. When Rumsfeld said, “you go to war with the Army you have,” he was apparently forgetting that we went to war months and months ago. The fact that soldiers are still unprotected, that we still have too few troops there, that prisoner abuse is still occurring, that the borders are still not even close to being sealed, that the insurgency is still threatening the entire future, that we still haven’t confronted the question of our global manpower needs … well, these issues go to the heart of the question of Rumsfeld’s and Bush’s competence. This is not knee-jerk anti-war sentiment. This is knee-jerk pro-war sentiment. The question of whether we should fight is to me an obvious one. The question of whether Bush and Rumsfeld have a clue what they’re doing is less easily answered. But we sure know they think they’re perfect. And their arrogance has just intensified. Not encouraging.

“Right now there are 22 active conflicts across the globe in which Muslims are involved. Most Muslims have not even heard of most of them because those conflicts do not provide excuses for fomenting hatred against the United States. Next time you hear someone say the US was in trouble in the Muslim world because of Israel, remember that things may not be that simple.” – Amir Taheri, in his latest column, “What If It’s Not Israel They Loathe?”

CLIMATE CHANGE: Reducing greenhouse gases was a cast-iron pledge from Tony Blair’s government in the two elections he has won. But there’s been no change in seven years. And Blair is preaching to the rest of the world on this?

“A generation ago, the big capitalists, who have no morals, as we know, decided to make use of the religious right in their class war against the middle class and against the regulations that were protecting those whom they considered to be their rightful prey-workers and consumers.” – Jane Smiley, from the classic Slate piece.

MALKIN AWARD NOMINEE II: “The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.” – Garrison Keillor, In These Times. Some occasional glimpses of originality, but mainly that peculiarly Malkinesque combo of hysterical and exhausted.

MALKIN AWARD NOMINEE III: “Look, I’m sure that the aforementioned Kerry cabal has a lot to say regarding …

• Buying a Bentley,
• Conducting an orgy,
• The preeminent natural herb for curbing the side effects of herpes,
• How to pick out the right stripper and midget for a ménage à trois,
• Where to get nice leather pants,
• Which silicone company produces the best butt implants,
• Where to buy Viagra by volume,
• How to drink alcohol like Otis on Mayberry RFD,
• How to juggle a wife and girlfriend(s),
• How to mousse one’s hair to stand up like Elsa Lancaster’s in The
Bride of Frankenstein,
• Where to get a tattoo on your ass,
• Where to have a tattoo removed from your ass,
• Where to buy a purple velvet spandex cat suit, a good cravat, and
felt booties,
• How to redistribute someone else’s wealth to pimps, whores and welfare brats,
• How to rid one’s nation of Judeo-Christian ethics and …
• How to make a mock-u-mentary film filled with complete crap about a
standing war-time president.” – Doug Giles, Townhall.com.

MALKIN AWARD NOMINEE IV: “Arrogant to the core, the elitist ketchup-digger revealed his true feelings toward George Bush – and by extension, all of us clodhopping carp-chompers in the Red States — with one infamous slip of the tongue.” – Ron Marr, CNS News.com. Actually, Marr makes it out of Malkin-land, with the phrase “clodhopping carp-chompers.” That’s original. If odd.

MALKIN AWARD NOMINEE V: “She’s not afraid to expose hypocritical environmentalists, needle pork-loving politicians or criticize the MTV generation’s morally deprived icons.” – Michelle Malkin, from her own biography.

MALKIN AWARD NOMINEE VI: A cartoon.

My case for states’ rights as a conservative principle – now more than ever. And here’s a small example of how it works.

IMMINENT IN CANADA: Civil marriage for gays across the country may be announced today. Legislation will follow.

“If you can’t stomach the truths of what our soldiers are doing and how brutally and bloodily they’re dying and in just what manner they have to kill those innocent Iraqi civilians in the name of BushCo’s desperate lurch toward greed and power and Iraqi oil fields and empire, maybe you don’t have the right to stick that little flag on your oil-sucking SUV.” – Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle. Many more tomorrow. Keep ’em coming.

Just for the record, this Coulterism is classic Malkin Award material:

My pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons they call ‘women’ at the Democratic National Convention.

Cliched? Check. Playground insults? Check. No originality? Check. Assumption of reader agreement? Check. But as I said, too easy.

I’m afraid Ann Coulter cannot be considered. No one else would stand a chance. But her abuse is more original than Malkin’s.

That’s what is now happening in … Massachusetts. No, not some right-wing plot to attack gay couples; but a natural and simple response to the fact that gay couples now have the right to civil marriage:

Large employers terminating or phasing out domestic-partner benefits for some or all Massachusetts workers include IBM Corp., Raytheon Co., Emerson College, Northeastern University, the National Fire Protection Association, Boston Medical Center, Baystate Health System, and The New York Times Co., which owns The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. “We’re saying if you’re a same-sex domestic partner, you now have the same option heterosexuals have, so we have to apply the same rules to you,” said Larry Emerson, Baystate’s vice president of human resources.

Amen. My first piece on marriage rights for gays – fifteen years ago – was written precisely because I was worried that the plethora of domestic partnerships arrangements, civil unions, etc. was bound to weaken civil marriage as a social norm. Give ’em marriage! And once gays have marriage, you can and should then dismantle all other civil arrangements. At the time, this was theory. But now we see it happening in practice: clear proof that letting gays marry can strengthen, rather than undermine, the existing institution. Gay activists should quit their whining. Religious right activists should reconsider their opposition. Gay marriage really is the best option for all of us.

THE MALKIN AWARD: Every now and again, you have to hand it to a polemicist. Here’s one single sentence from Michelle Malkin’s latest column:

Perhaps too much drug-addled ’60s nostalgia has burnt out the bleeding-hearts pacifists’ brain cells.

One sentence; four cliche-ridden, playground insults. Can you beat it? Contestants can be nominated from either right or left; but the sentence must be entirely devised to insult; it should be completely devoid of originality; it must have at least two hoary, dead-as-a-Norwegian-parrot cliches; and it must assume that readers already agree with the writer. Arbitrary mean-spiritedness wins extra points. Nominations for the Malkin Award are now open.

Many readers keep cavilling that the evidence of torture and prisoner abuse committed by U.S. forces is non-existent. They are tragically wrong. Recall this part of the Taguba report, the official investigation at Abu Ghraib. Here’s some of what happened:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall of his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

There is incontrovertible evidence of actual rapes and murders. Prisoners under U.S. command have been killed. Now we hear the following:

The memorandum said that the Defense Intelligence Agency officials saw prisoners being brought in to a detention center with burn marks on their backs and complaining about sore kidneys.

This was after the Abu Ghraib scandal came to light. Some Defense Intelligence Agency officials witnessed one officer “punch a prisoner in the face to the point the individual needed medical attention.” And part of the response to the complaints was to threaten the investigators. Just put it all together. We have a problem here.

“To criticise a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous but to criticise their religion – that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticise ideas – any ideas even if they are sincerely held beliefs – is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. And the law which attempts to say you can criticise or ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed. It all points to the promotion of the idea that there should be a right not to be offended. But in my view the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness – and the other represents oppression.” – Rowan Atkinson, AKA Mr Bean, opposing the latest liberal attempt to criminalize speech in Britain.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “The van Gogh murder is a little bit like our 9-11. The degree to which the United States had changed after 9-11 was hard to fathom in Europe. Now, this one murder seems to be having a similar effect on my fellow Dutch nationals. In Europe we have experienced our own homegrown terrorism for years, so although Dutch people felt enormous solidarity with Americans after 9-11, many asked, “Aren’t Americans a bit too focused on themselves when they keep saying that 9-11 was some huge paradigm shift?” The Netherlands, right now, is undergoing a similar sort of attitudinal change. It will be interesting to watch whether this change sparks a shift in Europeans’ generally hostile attitude towards George W. Bush’s aggressive foreign policy and his “axis of evil” style approach to the world.” – Marc Chavannes, Washington corresopndent for NRC Handelsblad, in the American Prospect.