The Dish

… than any of the other candidates.” That’s how Sid Blumenthal describes John Kerry. I would not be surprised if New Hampshire deflates him a little.

ROVE’S INVITEES: An interesting aside in a National Review Online piece by one Janice Shaw Crouse, of the hard right Concerned Women for America:

I watched the speech in an auditorium in the White House with an invited group of conservative opinion leaders.

Here’s a challenge to an enterprising journalist: whom else did Karl Rove invite to watch the president throw some red meat to the evangelical base? It would be instructive, I think, of whom this administration really cares about.

BROOKS ON EDWARDS: “What John Edwards had going for him [in Iowa] is first of all he’s the best campaigner I’ve seen since Bill Clinton. His speech is the most fantastic stump speech. I followed it around four or five times just because it’s so much fun. You see the crowds. They go crazy. The best moment in the speech. He’s talking about himself as a trial lawyer. He said I was this little trial lawyer and went up against the corporate interests, the corporate lawyers, the best money can buy, dignified people. You can hear them thinking Republicans. Then he says ‘and they looked at me and said what’s this guy doing in the courtroom with us? We’re the best and the brightest.’ Then he turns to the crowd and says, ‘you know I beat them and I beat them and I beat them’ and the crowd is going crazy because they know this is the guy who can beat the corporate Republicans. Its a fantastic, its the best moment. And that’s just…he’s just a fantastic….the Republicans want to get overconfidence cure, go to a John Edwards rally.” – David Brooks, on the Newshour. This is getting to be the conventional wisdom among the press. It bodes well for the John Grisham from a boy band.

“Oh, in the Federal Reserve Board, I would be looking for someone that would set standards in this country, in terms of our banking, our — in how government regulates the Federal Reserve as we see it under Greenspan, that we would not be protecting the big businesses; we would not be protecting banking interests in a way that would not, in my judgment, lead toward mass employment, mass development and mass production.” – Revd. Al Sharpton, Democratic candidate for president, at the New Hampshire debate. Please send in any new incoherent, uninformed, ill-phrased nonsense from a man the Democrats keep pretending to take seriously.

Check out Michael Moore’s 1999 diatribe against the war to stop genocide in the Balkans. Now, we all know Moore opposes any military action to stop dictators murdering innocents. But doesn’t Moore recall that it was one, er, General Wesley Clark, who was commanding this military operation? Money quote:

Right about now, some of you, with all good intentions, are saying, “But, Mike, this Milosevic guy is a madman. He’s committing genocide. We should not ignore this as we did the Holocaust in the early days of World War II. He must be stopped by any means necessary.”
Yes, he must be stopped. But bombing the people of his country is exactly the wrong way to stop him. In fact, it has only strengthened him. There was a growing dissident movement in Yugoslavia before the war, and every letter I get from these brave souls tells me that the bombing has set back their struggle so incredibly far that they worry they will now be stuck with Milosevic for a long time. They are pleading with us to stop it. The bombing has made him a hero at a time when nearly half of the country was very unhappy with his leadership. We did not consult the anti-Milosevic movement in advance to see if they would like our help in the form of 10,000 bombing sorties. We just went off half-cocked on our own, and started killing the very people we were claiming to save. Anyone who remembers Vietnam knows that sordid logic and insanity. We have strengthened Milosevic and destroyed his opposition. Happy now?

Michael Moore: a man who never without an excuse for keeping murdering tyrants in power. But now he’s supporting the man who bombed Milosevic into submission? How about an explanation, Mr Moore?

Classic Drudge response. I wonder if I’m the only person on the planet who’s friends with Drudge and has sung karaoke with Margaret Cho. I think they’re both geniuses in different ways. When Cho is funny, she’s extraordinary. But increasingly, she has succumbed to asinine political diatribes rather than her trademark dead-on social comedy. A pity. But I still love her humor.

That’s the only substantive conclusion I can draw from the New Hampshire debate last night. His complete vacuousness in the face of Brit Hume’s recitation of his Times of London piece celebrating the Iraq war was stunning. And his inability to distance himself from the vile Michael Moore’s comments was, to my mind, definitive of his attempt to be all things to all people. His slow drift down in the polls might now accelerate. At least I hope so. Lieberman was by far the best performer, perhaps because he has so little to lose at this point. He was funny, self-deprecating, human and, when it mattered, sincere and passionate. (And Lieberman, of course, was the only one in any way persuasive on the Iraq war.) Kerry was Kerry – dull, almost as pompous as Peter Jennings (but not quite), and uninspiring. I don’t share the Republican conventional wisdom that he can be Dukakised. But I cannot get too enthusiastic. John Edwards was the only candidate who seemed able to engage the viewers, and you can see how he won over jurors in his time. He still strikes me as not quite ready – but I want him to be. He had no clue about the Defense of Marriage Act, which is not the end of the world, but not a good sign. (Both he and Kerry made the states’ rights argument very effectively against a constitutional amendment, however.) Kucinich just gets better and better: I have a serious hathos issue with the guy. He mesmerizes me – in a disturbing kind of way. Almost everything he says is nuts, but I can’t help kind of liking him. Dean has enough money to survive – maybe longer than many of us now expect. But he’s surely not going to win and cannot be a veep. It looks like Kerry will win both Iowa and New Hampshire, which will make him extremely hard to beat. We’ll see. A Kerry-Edwards ticket still seems like a good bet to me.

FORGIVING PETER JENNINGS: Yes, of course, he’s beyond self-important. Some of his questions seemed longer than many of the answers. (Brit Hume, of course, was great.) But I have to say Jennings’ question to Al Sharpton about whom he’d appoint to the Federal Reserve was inspired. Sharpton flailed in ways you rarely see a politician flail. It was a remarkable, rhetorical stiletto wound. And oh so gentle.

“Simply put, Edwards is one of the most talented political speakers I’ve ever seen-on nights like last night, Clinton-level. He has a way of turning a hall into a courtroom, completely engaging with the audience as if they were members of a jury. He uses his hands to express himself so vividly that it looks like he’s doing his own simultaneous translation into American Sign Language. Edwards may not have the foreign policy background of a Kerry or a Clark (and his speech was notably thin on that subject), but he has something that may be much more valuable: a genuine affinity for ordinary people.” – Jake Weisberg, taking a short break from skiiing, in Slate.

CHURCHILL’S PARROT: It may be too good a story to be true. Damn.

THE REMARKABLE JACK STRAW: Don’t miss Jay Nordlinger’s wonderful vignette of the British foreign secretary at Davos.

The boyfriend urges me to listen to “Wing” singing ‘Close To You’ by the Carpenters. Oh my God.

The New Republic has its doubts.

LOG CABIN WON’T ENDORSE: The gay Republican group will not endorse president Bush after his pandering to the far right in his State of the Union. Charlie Francis of the Republican Unity Coalition suspends judgment – for now. Good for LCR. Their new leader, Patrick Guerrerio, is one of the most decent and skilled political leaders I know. He will take some flak for this, but it matters. The president must know that dressing up discrimination in “tolerant” language is still discrimination. CORRECTION: The NYT got it wrong. Imagine that! LCR has not yet decided whether to endorse the president or not.

Well, I’ve never tried to please everyone with this blog but the torrent of abuse and mockery yesterday because of my criticisms of the SOTU caused me a little grief. According to many Republicans, I’m selling out to the “hard left.” According to some Democrats, I’ve finally seen the light, ha, ha, ha. How about applying principles to changing events and circumstances? It says something about what has happened to the Republican party that supporting fiscal responsibility is now the position of the “hard left.” And it says something about some Democrats that you either have to hate this president or love him unconditionally. Why can’t a grown-up have a complicated position? I’m a fiscal conservative, social/cultural liberal and foreign policy hawk. Neither party provides a comfortable home for people like me. I supported Clinton in 1992, backed Dole on moral grounds in 96 and opposed impeachment. I backed Bush (narrowly) in 2000. The war made my support for Bush stronger than I ever expected. I still admire his courage during that terrible time and respect his tenacity against terror. This time, I’m leaning toward Bush for those reasons but appalled by his fiscal recklessness, worried by his coziness with the religious far right, and concerned that he has no forward strategy in the war. I’m equally concerned about the obvious irresponsibility of the Democrats on national security (and spending) at a time of great peril. But at least they’re not going to bait gays and nominate judges like Frank Pickering. So I’m stuck, and trying to figure things out as I go along. Hence my attempt to look at the Democratic candidates as possible presidents and subject my support for Bush to further scrutiny. Why is that such a crime? Isn’t part of what’s wrong with our politics that this kind of weighing of options has become so taboo? (CORRECTION: That should be Charles Pickering, not Frank. My bad.)

DON’T COUNT DEAN OUT: In money terms, he’s still far ahead of his rivals. Sure, his crazed non-concession speech surely hurt him. But there’s a long way to go. With Kerry surging, Clark fading and Edwards gearing up for South Carolina, it’s a three way race. Why not a Kerry-Edwards ticket? Makes a lot of sense to me.

I’M NOT ALONE: Among other weenie lefties attacking president Bush on spending are a large swathe of conservative Republicans. Here’s what Bush has achieved:

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll this month found that Democrats had nearly caught up with Republicans on the question of which party does a better job of controlling government spending. The poll found that 33 percent of respondents said Republicans did a better job, with Democrats at 31 percent.

The voters aren’t dumb. Karl Rove, alas, didn’t even begin to see this coming. It’s hard to put the mess better than this sardonic sound-bite.

WHERE THE WIND IS BLOWING: Matt Welch pans the SOTU and hammers Taranto for calling opposition to the PATRIOT Act the “al Qaeda cheering section.” Glenn shares my feelings about Bush’s domestic drift right now, but is unenthusiastic about the Dems as well. (Personally, I think the best argument for a Democratic president is that divided government tends to do less harm than when the legislative and executive branches are controlled by the same party.) Is the blogosphere turning against Bush? A little, I’d say. The president is in a lot more trouble than he seems to think. His cocky partisanship Tuesday night was unnerving.

DEAN IN A KAFFIYEH: The irrepressible Allahpundit has the last word.

ISLAMIC ADULTERY: Yes, you can even get an ayatollah’s blessing for it, if you call it a “temporary” or “pleasure” marriage. Riverbend blog is worried about creeping Islamism in Iraq. She should be. Oh, and want to know what Ayatollah Sistani really thinks? He has his own webpage!