The Dish

South Park’s Stan gets hounded by P. Diddy. And his electoral choice is between a douche and a turd sandwich. Sounds familiar.

Here’s a broadside against the Democrat from my friend, Marty Peretz:

John Kerry speaks, not unfairly, of George W. Bush’s habits of denial. But Kerry himself is in denial. He is in denial about the United Nations. He is in denial about the Australian election that returned to office for an unprecedented fourth term its prime minister who has been, with his country, a pillar of the Iraq coalition. He is in denial about Japan, whose government, unlike Germany’s and France’s, does not carp at the United States. He is in denial about Afghanistan, where, for the first time in history, men and women, riding on donkeys and walking barefoot across great distances, have exercised the right to choose those who govern them. He is in denial about Iraq itself. The Jordanian daily Al Ra’i recently called Moqtada Al Sadr’s apparent retreat from armed struggle “a farewell to arms” that is as politically significant as the establishment of the provisional authority. Has Kerry come close to recognizing this? Has he acknowledged that the Bush administration has negotiated with nato a plan to send, starting in November, up to 3,000 soldiers to train Iraqi troops? These soldiers will be under the command of General David Petraeus, who is mustering the military might and political will to retake much of the Sunni triangle. Many Iraqis now have second thoughts about opposing the coalition. Even the BBC has said as much. But Kerry hasn’t.

Yes, there’s denial on both sides. Whose is more dangerous? That’s the question. And if Kerry wins, he can expect to be subjected to relentless scrutiny from pro-war types like Marty and, ahem, your humble blogger.

“I think one thing you have to face up to is the fact there are roughly 70 million people in America who do not believe in evolution – and those are Bush supporters,” – Seymour Hersh, at the University of Michigan.

More deception from the far-left, coordinated by Harold Ickes. Worse than Michael Moore.

BAUER LIES: Here’s another mendacious ad from the religious right in Oklahoma, orchestrated by Gary Bauer. Similar tactics in North Carolina forced one paper to retract an endorsement. I wonder if Bill Kristol, noted defender of lesbian dignity, will complain.

The 2004 election version.

Maybe they don’t all go for the challenger, after all. (Hat tip: Mickey.)

More evidence of a war-plan gone dangerously awry:

[T]he Al Qaqaa case may only be the tip of the iceberg. As many as 10,000 other conventional-arms dumps dotted around Iraq are believed to have been looted after the U.S. invasion, the officials say. In addition, as many as 30 out of 90 of Saddam’s known nuclear research facilities were also stripped down-some to the ground-by looters.
While much of the material taken from the nuclear sites is believed to have been “dual use” manufacturing equipment largely useless to terrorists, the looting of conventional-arms depots means that Zarqawi and the ex-Baathists are not unlikely to run out of weapons any time soon-and that the insurgency may have a long way to go before it runs out of steam.

My point entirely.

There’s new evidence that Syria has been testing chemical weapons in Darfur.

The reason the story of missing munitions at al Qa Qaa is an important one is not that, in and of itself, it’s a huge deal. As Bill Kristol points out in one of the weakest defenses of the administration yet, the NYT story “didn’t put it into context how important 380 tons are when there are tens of thousands of explosives in the country.” Yes, that’s right. Compared to all the other munitions sites that were looted during and after the invasion, al Qa Qaa is not that devastating. But what about all the other sites? What about the fact that a war begun as a means to restrain Saddam’s weaponry actually helped disperse it? That’s the real issue. And as the facts emerge, I’ve become convinced of one astounding thing: the Bush administration didn’t care very much about the dangers from Saddam’s alleged WMDs, or conventional munitions. Safeguarding those sites, keeping those weapons out of the hands of terrorists, was not a major priority. Here’s a section from the AP story on al Qa Qaa:

As the rest of Perkins’ brigade moved on, the 3rd Battalion spent two days in the area, sweeping for other Iraqi forces, Perkins said. The troops didn’t specifically search for any high explosives, although they were aware that Al-Qaqaa was an important site for what was believed to be Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs.

(My emphasis.) The more you think about it, the more extraordinary that is.

THE WIDER PROBLEM: Check out this piece by Peter Galbraith, a supporter of the war who was appalled by what he saw in the invasion’s aftermath. He reported back to Paul Wolfowitz:

I also described two particularly disturbing incidents — one I had witnessed and the other I had heard about. On April 16, 2003, a mob attacked and looted the Iraqi equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control, taking live HIV and black fever virus among other potentially lethal materials. US troops were stationed across the street but did not intervene because they didn’t know the building was important.
When he found out, the young American lieutenant was devastated. He shook his head and said, “I hope I am not responsible for Armageddon.” About the same time, looters entered the warehouses at Iraq’s sprawling nuclear facilities at Tuwaitha on Baghdad’s outskirts. They took barrels of yellowcake (raw uranium), apparently dumping the uranium and using the barrels to hold water. US troops were at Tuwaitha but did not interfere… It appears that troops did not receive relevant intelligence about Iraq’s WMD facilities, nor was there any plan to secure them. Even after my briefing, the Pentagon leaders did nothing to safeguard Iraq’s nuclear sites.

Yes, as Hitchens has put it, this is near-impeachable negligence. We are less safe as a result. How can anyone say that Bush is our best bet in the war on terrorism when his own conduct has put this country at grave danger from the very weapons he was supposed to defend us from? And when his campaign then comes out and says that this kind of criticism is smearing the troops, they have told us all we need to know. They have no real answers. So they smear their critics.

Another conservative endorsement of Kerry. The editor, Bill Emmott, put it this way: “It was a difficult call, given that we endorsed George Bush in 2000 and supported the war in Iraq. But in the end we felt he has been too incompetent to deserve re-election.” Ouch. I’m glad they focused on Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, two huge blows to America’s reputation as a guarantor of human rights, and two issues largely missing from the debates:

The biggest mistake, though, was one that will haunt America for years to come. It lay in dealing with prisoners-of-war by sending hundreds of them to the American base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, putting them in a legal limbo, outside the Geneva conventions and outside America’s own legal system. That act reflected a genuinely difficult problem: that of having captured people of unknown status but many of whom probably did want to kill Americans, at a time when to set them free would have been politically controversial, to say the least. That difficulty cannot neutralise the damage caused by this decision, however. Today, Guantánamo Bay offers constant evidence of America’s hypocrisy, evidence that is disturbing for those who sympathise with it, cause-affirming for those who hate it. This administration, which claims to be fighting for justice, the rule of law and liberty, is incarcerating hundreds of people, whether innocent or guilty, without trial or access to legal representation. The White House’s proposed remedy, namely military tribunals, merely compounds the problem.

If they get re-elected, they need to fix this. Or Kerry has to do the job.

WAS LINCOLN GAY? This is going to become a major controversy. Due out early next year, scholar C.A. Tripp’s painstakingly researched book on “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln” (Free Press) contains too much information to be dismissed. Did you know that Lincoln wrote a teenage poem about gay marriage? That he slept in the same bed as men for much of his life? Doug Ireland sets the stage for the coming debate.