The Dish

“Alan (caller to Seattle’s KUOW): I am not afraid to speak out until I am shot down in the streets because I am a patriot … The president of the United States should be held before the court of international law for treason along with his administration.
Lewis Lapham: I agree with everything Alan just said… Good for Alan.” You can hear the radio show here. Hat tip: Polipundit.

Jimmy Swaggart’s apology for saying he’d kill a gay man who looked at him the wrong way:

Swaggart said he has jokingly used the expression “killing someone and telling God he died” thousands of times, about all sorts of people. He said the expression is figurative and not meant to harm. “It’s a humorous statement that doesn’t mean anything. You can’t lie to God — it’s ridiculous,” Swaggart told The Associated Press. “If it’s an insult, I certainly didn’t think it was, but if they are offended, then I certainly offer an apology.”

If it’s an insult? Ask Matthew Shepard and countless others who are indeed dead because someone took Swaggart’s advice. I’m not going to belabor the point because most evangelical Christians do not share Swaggart’s violent hatred. But isn’t it amazing that someone allegedly representing the Gospels of Jesus Christ would advocate murdering an already despised minority? It seems to me that a central tenet of Jesus’ message was that it is precisely the outcasts of society who are worth treasuring and loving. Yet it is a central tenet of the Christian right that the marginalized be marginalized and discriminated against still further. That is one of the many reasons they are neither Christian nor right.

An interesting development from Stratfor (subscribers only):

More than 1,000 of the some 20,000 Syrian troops based in Lebanon began dismantling their bases near Beirut to redeploy closer to the Syrian border or to leave the country altogether, a Lebanese official said Sept. 21. The official, who declined to be named, said Syrian troops have started moving from hilltop positions south of Beirut in the towns of Aramoun, Chuweifat, Damour, Doha and Khaldeh. The second phase of the operation involves a shift of troops from eastern and northern areas to the eastern part of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley or to the border. The redeployment is scheduled for completion in a few days.
With this massive redeployment, Syrian President Bashar al Assad is indicating to Israel and the United States that he is ready to strike a deal that could lead to the complete withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon.
This could signal Damascus’ willingness to stand down from its non-cooperative stance toward the United States — yet another example of the immense geopolitical shift in the region resulting from the U.S. ouster of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

The best news I’ve heard in a long time.

Here’s a copy of the RNC mailing that was sent out in West Virginia, in which not voting for Bush means that the Bible will be “banned” and gays will be married. This RNC mailing has the word “Arkansas” on it, which implies that this kind of hate-mongering demagoguery may be in several states. Ed Gillespie says he doesn’t know about it. RNC fliers in two states and he doesn’t know about it? If not, why not? And is he trying to stop these lies from getting out there? Yeah, right.

That’s the essential question about Iraq. I’m not there. I can only read as much as I can and try and make sense of it. I sure hope the president’s boundless optimism is right, but it was a little worrying to hear his response to criticism yesterday. Here’s one:

Later, asked by reporters about calls from GOP Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Chuck Hagel (Neb.) for a more candid assessment about the Iraq situation, Bush replied that both men “want me elected as president. We agree that the world is better off with Saddam Hussein sitting in a prison cell. And that stands in stark contrast to the statement my opponent made yesterday, when he said that the world was better off with Saddam in power.” Kerry has said he would not have waged war in Iraq if he had been president but has asserted that “the world is better off” without Hussein in power.

So his main concern is not whether those senators are right, but whether they are voting for him. That seems consonant with his general approach. And then he distorts his opponent’s position. The Washington Post then notes the following:

Bush also played down the significance of a CIA report forecasting more difficulty in Iraq. “The CIA laid out several scenarios and said life could be lousy, life could be okay, life could be better, and they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like,” he said. The confidential August report to policymakers, according to an administration official who described it yesterday, outlined three scenarios over the next 18 months: a period of “tenuous stability,” a time of “further fragmentation and extremism” or a period of “trending to civil war.”

It seems he reads this CIA report the way he read previous assessments of Iraq’s WMDs: he reads what he wants to read. Look, this war has to succeed; and if this president is re-elected in November, we will all have to do whatever we can to make sure he does. But it is not crazy now to ask whether he has enough of a grip on the situation to carry us forward. His comments yesterday suggest that the cocoon is intact. Which is more worrying than any news from Iraq.

NOW, BASRA: The British army’s smart tactics once made Basra a success story of the liberation. But now, apparently, the city is teetering on the brink:

Last month, the British Army fired 100,000 rounds of ammunition in southern Iraq. The base in al-Ammara sustained more than 400 direct mortar hits. The British battalion there counted some 853 separate attacks of different kinds: mortars, roadside bombs, rockets and machine-gun fire… A vicious campaign of intimidation doesn’t help matters. Last month, five cleaning ladies at a British base were murdered on their way to work. Two local translators disappeared. Their severed heads were found outside the front gate. But perhaps the most worrying development of the August fighting was that none of Basra’s 25,000 police officers came to the aid of the British soldiers. Some even helped the gunmen. I met one of the senior civilian political advisors to the military command. Every time he came to Basra things seemed a “step change worse”, he said.

Yes, this is the BBC. But the report provides some good news, and seems pretty balanced to me. I link. You decide.

Here’s a point worth remembering:

The anti-war website Iraqbodycount.net estimates that between 11,487 and 13,458 Iraqis have been killed since the start of the war. Added to that are 1049 coalition deaths listed. That is a staggering 14,507 deaths since March 19 last year – a horrendous average of 28.5 people, real human beings, a day for the 509 days.
How could this ever be justified? Wouldn’t Iraq have been better off without this?
It is estimated that Saddam killed between 500,000 and 1 million of his own people in the 13 years since the Gulf War, not including the effects of the sanctions. The lower number averages out to be 105 a day.
Assuming Saddam had stayed in power, as the anti-war movement would have had, and assuming his regime did not fundamentally change, Saddam could have killed between 53,445 and 106,890 innocent people in the same 509 days.
In other words, the war probably cost between 38,938 and 92,383 fewer lives than the so-called peace would have cost.

Couldn’t agree more. It’s just that using the standard of Saddam Hussein is not exactly morally reassuring about our current conduct. (Hat tip: Morley.) For a harrowing tale of apparent U.S. abuse of prisoners, here’s a first hand account from the Guardian (and yes, that means keep your skepticism on high).

LEFT VERSUS LEFT: Great post by Kevin Drum on that awful old bore, Robert Scheer. Money quote:

[Scheer’s] a smart guy and a talented writer, but he’s too self-indulgent to modulate his tone based on his audience. He’s got valuable op-ed real estate at his disposal, and the purpose of valuable op-ed real estate is to persuade doubters, not drive them into the hands of your enemies by confirming their worst fears about your own side.
Until he figures that out, he needs to be confined to writing flyers for anti-globo rallies and polemics for CounterPunch. In the meantime, I don’t feel like losing any elections because of him.

Can’t Kinsley get rid of him?

Jack Shafer asks why it took CBS News so long to correct the record. he makes a bunch of good points – but it doesn’t seem to occur to him that liberal bias played even a teensy part in the Rather/Mapes blinders. There are cocoons other than Rather’s, it seems. And Jack is in one. Does he think that Slate, for example, is not a liberal website? That would be a good place to start.

SEVEN MILLION DOLLARS: That’s what Dan Rather gets a year. I think the need to feel pity for him just evaporated. Please, leave.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Kate O’Beirne–and Jim–hold the greatest parties. Kate did not forget those wonderful little pastries for dessert that I have tasted only in her house, the chocolate one to die for, the vanilla one merely exquisite. And it was really fun to meet so many readers and fans of NRO, and to listen to exciting observations and analyses from them, and get some questions and probings… I was, however, startled to meet so many fellow writers on NRO, whose names have become famous to me, but whom I’ve never met. Wow! are you fellow writers young! …I have seldom in my life felt so grandfatherly… And I do not think that marvelous Communist rendition that John Derbyshire managed with enormous aplomb and feeling actually was sung in Mandarin Chinese, as he said. It sounded to me like a dialect far, far to the South of that. But the Communist feeling was authentic. Especially if one imagines Communists as if they were actually in the cast of Les Miserables (Al Gore’s favorite show). John was heroic, and he alone would have made the evening…But everything about the evening was sweetened by the hostess and her welcoming, laid-back, happy ways. She does a party right. So that the conversation flew fast and furious. The drinks flowed, and the smoke soared skyward.” – Michael Novak. Novak wrote essentially the same piece about the situation in Iraq here.

Jonah cites Dunkirk as evidence that even Churchill was fallible as a war leader. But, of course, Dunkirk was Chamberlain’s legacy and occurred just after the Brits checked out their war-leader (Chamberlain), realized he was incompetent, and picked another one. A better example would be Gallipoli – a spectacular military catastrophe that Churchill engineered – and took decades to recover from. Of course, the comparison between Bush and Churchill is ludicrous in any case, as most Bush supporters would agree. My own angle: Churchill never failed to remind the Brits that they were up against it, and he was always candid about failure – because he knew that falsely-optimistic spin only weakened morale in the long term. He also made sure to include opposition leaders in his cabinet, made amends with his union foes, and did everything to keep the country united as it faced a war for survival. Bush has managed to divide this country in wartime (with help, of course, from the Michael-Moore-Terry-McAuliffe left).

Some are asking us not to give up on their faltering steps toward democracy. We shouldn’t.

The text is here.