The Dish

The trouble with letting anti-Western fascists take root in your society is that the backlash that is delayed can be all the more powerful when unleashed. Even in Holland, the sentiment in favor of cracking down on Jihadist immigrants is getting close to irresistible. Money quote from a fascinating AP story:

“We are a Dutch democratic society. We have our own norms and values,” right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders told The Associated Press in an interview. “If you chose radical Islam you can leave, and if you don’t leave voluntarily then we will send you away. This is the only message possible.”… Wilders said that without swift, bold action, Islamic fundamentalism will topple the country’s democratic system. “The Netherlands has been too tolerant to intolerant people for too long,” he said. “We should not import a retarded political Islamic society to our country. There is nothing to be ashamed of to say this. It’s not Islam. I speak out against the facts.”

Intolerance for the intolerant: the big liberal internal conflict begins. And we hear this after the U.S. storms a Jihadist mosque in Baghdad. Things are changing, aren’t they?

BACKLASH IN GOP-LAND: The Pod and Brooks. As Stephen Bainbridge points out, only the truly partisan right are defending DeLay now.

CAMBRIDGE POSTCARD: “My wife and I were in New York on 9/11. We had walked the city streets the afternoon after the destruction of the twin towers. Walking the streets of Cambridge the day after this election we found an eerily similar atmosphere. There were fewer people out than normally, and they were walking quietly, unsmilingly, looking shell-shocked, heads down, grim and preoccupied.” – Erik Tarloff, Prospect magazine. Apart from 3,000 deaths, it was roughly as bad, wasn’t it?

IN DEFENSE OF THE PILL: An emailer worries about the idea of “Catholic healthcare,” where doctors and pharmacists might abstain from prescribing birth control medication:

I have no intention of getting into an abortion debate or to discuss the value of contraception. I want simply to discuss the medical value of the pill outside of its contraceptive uses. I will not bore or disgust you with the details, but let’s say that since I was 17 I have had … female troubles which going on the pill tempered. When I was 24, after going off the pill for 2 years, I developed endometriosis. I have additional issues as well. Guess what makes my life free from monthly agony? Guess what will make it even possible for me to conceive in the future? That’s right, it is the monthly regulation of my hormones by the pill. There are millions of women with similar health problems not cured, but managed by taking the pill. This aspect of the contraception debate is never addressed in the public forum. How do we change that?

Well, this is a start.

A LIBERAL ON VAN GOGH: Here’s a liberal column on van Gogh from the Aspen Times. Not exactly national, but it’s strong.

Has anyone else noticed how Lou Dobbs has become a complete crank on the issue of free trade and illegal immigration? Every day, he bangs on and on about it in the most hysterical and xenophobic terms. It’s pretty good television for a few minutes, but, after a while, it’s like listening to the bar bore after one too many drinks. I’m sure it’s also good for the ratings. But the distinction between CNN and Fox has been narrowing a little of late.

DELAY ENABLERS: I have to say Josh Marshall has been having a great deal of fun at the expense of all those Republican Congressmen who have been loosening the ethics rules so that Tom DeLay can stay in charge. Check out the squirming.

The one thing I really feared about the necessary cleaning out of Falluja was that it might spawn a national uprising. It didn’t. The good news is obvious; the worrying news is that the ethnic divisions of Iraq may be reasserting themselves, as the Kurds and Shi’a happily watch the Sunnis get clobbered. Still, it seems to me the good news outweighs the worries. Yes, we may now have a situation in which the Sunnis boycott the January elections. So be it. That would be preferable to a postonement; and preferable to restricting the elections to the Shiite and Kurdish areas. Juan Cole suggests the following emergency idea:

If elections are held in January, I see only one way to avoid disaster. This would be some sort of emergency decree by the current government that sets aside, say, 20% of seats in parliament for the Sunni Arabs. This procedure would seat Sunni Arab candidates in order of the popularity of their lists and in order of their rank within the lists on which they run. But the results would essentially be “graded on a curve.” In a way, this procedure is already being followed for women, who are guaranteed 30% of seats. This solution is Lebanon-like and is not optimal, but it might be the best course if long-term sectarian and ethnic conflict is to be avoided. Remember, the first thing the new parliament will do is craft a permanent constitution. You want Sunni Arabs sitting at that table, or else.

Maybe insisting that elections will happen and that this will be the fallback may tempt a few more Sunnis to participate. But that will be up to them.

A good column by John Podhoretz on the latest DeLay maneuver lays it all out:

The message it sends is this: Party, not principle. And that is a terrible message, because when parties sacrifice principle for power, they begin to eat away at their own legitimacy.
DeLay and others may imagine that the GOP control of the House is all but permanent because of demographic and national trends. That may be true – for one more election, in 2006. By 2008, though, all bets will be off. And more behavior like the DeLay rule change will cause wise gamblers to place heavy bets against an arrogant and power-blinded GOP.

Yep. It’s beginning.

No, we don’t know exactly who shot a young Jewish man in the head on the streets of Antwerp. But his prominence in the Jewish community, and the atmosphere now prevalent in Europe, where the Jihadists are deploying terror and intimidation in an echo of Nazi street thugs, makes it likely that this was another Islamist murder. The cravenness of the p.c. authorities continues:

Representatives of the Antwerp police and the Belgian Justice Ministry held a press conference on Thursday to officially address the incident. “They didn’t give away any new information,” Ceitlin said. “They did, however, call Belgian Jewish leaders prior to the meeting and asked them not to participate in it, so as not to turn the press conference into a ‘Jewish happening,'” he said.
The shooting death of Na’eh comes on the same day that a Belgian politician of Moroccan origin who has repeatedly criticized Islamic culture came under police protection after being threatened with “ritual killing.”

I think we get the message.

THE LEFT AND VAN GOGH: Finally, some sort of column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

And Holocaust denial. The invaluable Oliver Kamm is on the case again.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Overstated though the dichotomy is between red and blue America, it does mean that no one who is at all well informed can believe that America is Bush and Bush is America. If the west is divided, the dividing line runs slap-bang through the middle of America.
And, on the other side of the pond, through Europe. We don’t have so many Christian fundamentalists any more… But we do have Islamic fundamentalists, in growing numbers. And, I would say, we have secular fundamentalists: people who believe that to live by the tenets of Islam, or other religions, is incompatible with what it is to be fully human, and want citizens to be educated and the state to legislate accordingly. While I have been in America, the possible consequences have been played out on the streets of prosperous, pacific, tolerant Holland, with the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and the counter-attack on an Islamic school. If America has its culture wars, its Kulturkampf, so do we. And ours could be bloodier.
So the expressions of European solidarity after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks (“Nous sommes tous Américains”) should acquire a new meaning and a new context after the November 2 2004 elections. Hands need to be joined across the sea in an old cause: the defence of the Enlightenment. We are all blue Americans now.” – Timothy Garton Ash, in the Guardian today.

NOW, A SHARK’S TALE: A cartoon feature meets the religious right. Money quote:

The film does not come right out and say that we should all accept homosexuality. And, naturally, children should be taught to be accepting of others. But as Plugged In’s Steven Isaac notes, “Had this movie been released 20 years ago, nobody would have been calling attention to this subject.” Two decades ago, accepting differences meant accepting a person who might have a different skin color, or be from a different ethnic background. Such differences are immutable characteristics, however, and not sexual choices. In this respect, Shark Tale comes far too close to taking a bite out of traditional moral and spiritual beliefs.

Yep. They’re talking about a cartoon vegetarian shark.

An account of a recent seminar at the Adam Smith Institute.

OH WELL: There I was, getting all excited about a possible Bush reform that would streamline the tax code, empower ordinary citizens at the expense of lobbyists and bureaucrats, and restore the popular and populist elements of tax-cutting. Now, the cold water seems to be in abundance. According to this Washington Post story,

[T]he administration plans to push major amendments that would shield interest, dividends and capitals gains from taxation, expand tax breaks for business investment and take other steps intended to simplify the system and encourage economic growth… To pay for them, the administration is considering eliminating the deduction of state and local taxes on federal income tax returns and scrapping the business tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance.

Wow. If you wanted to give Paul Krugman another round of ammunition in arguing that the Bushies only care about the investor classes and corporations, this couldn’t be bettered. And making it harder to provide people with health insurance? That’s the ticket.

ONE BUSH: Jeb seems to understand that a state amendment to ban legal protections for gay couples is neither good public policy, nor even faintly necessary. Bush’s radical idea is that you should only amend the constitution if there’s a proven need. Since there’s no legal history of civil marriage being transportable to another state if that state opposes it as a matter of public policy, and since the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act enshrines that principle even more emphatically, and since even Massachusetts hasn’t finally resolved its policy, real conservatives should wait and see. But, of course, the Republican party is no longer controlled for the most part by real conservatives.

“Britain, Whales, Say Cheerio to Fox-Hunting.” – from the Fox News site’s “Latest Headlines”. I had no idea that it was a marine sport.

A lovely tribute to Bill Clinton today. Money quote:

Over the years, Bill Clinton showed himself to be much more than a good politician. His home state elected him governor in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s, because he was an innovator, a serious student of policy, and a man of great compassion. In the White House, the whole nation witnessed his brilliance and mastery of detail, his persuasive power, and his persistence. The President is not the kind to give up a fight. His staffers were known to say, “If Clinton were the Titanic, the iceberg would sink.” (Laughter.)
During his presidency, Bill Clinton seized important opportunities on issues from welfare to free trade. He was a tireless champion of peace in the Middle East. He used American power in the Balkans to confront aggression and halt ethnic cleansing. And in all his actions and decisions, the American people sensed a deep empathy for the poor and the powerless. Shortly before leaving office, President Clinton said, “Christ admonished us that our lives will be judged by how we do unto the least of our neighbors.” Throughout his career, Bill Clinton has done his best to live up to that standard. And Americans respect him for it.

I wish we saw more of this Bush.