The Dish

More details about Glenn Beck's darling.

A few things stand out to me, from the perspective of the US. The first is the Conservative Party's full-throated defense of socialized medicine, a system that makes Obamacare look like a Tea Party project:

"We are the party of the National Health Service today because we not only back the values of the NHS, we back its funding and we have a vision for its future."

My italics. Those values are collectivist healthcare delivered, for the most part, to everyone free at point of access via general taxation in government-owned and run hospitals and government-employed doctors. Then this piece of modest fiscal realism:

Bringing forward the date at which the state pension age starts to rise to 66, although it will not be sooner than 2016 for men and 2020 for women.

Still not enough, but at least they're prepping for the generational crunch. And the principal difference with Labour?

Slightly more emphasis on individual responsibility and the need to protect and enhance civil society rather than the state. Slightly more emphasis on tackling the debt through spending cuts than Labour. They also back high-speed trains, rewarding marriage in the tax system and non-carbon energy. They leave abortion rights to individual lawmakers' conscience and favor civil equality for gays and gay couples in relationship law, and military service.

Obama could easily be a Tory leader in Britain.

The Tory party's bill-board campaign – more important in densely urban Britain than in the US – aims personally at Brown and calls for "change." A critical assessment here.

Medvedev’s assessment of Obama:

MEDVEDEV: He’s very comfortable partner, it’s very interesting to be with him. The most important thing that distinguishes him from many other people — I won’t name anyone by name — he’s a thinker, he thinks when he speaks. Which is already pretty good.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You had somebody in your mind, I think. (LAUGHS)

MEDVEDEV: Obviously I do have someone on my mind. I don’t want to offend anyone.

He’s eager to listen to his partner, which is a pretty good quality for a politician. Because any politician is to a certain degree a mentor. They preach something. And the ability to listen to their partner is very important for the politician. And he is pretty deeply immersed in the subject, so he has a good knowledge of what he’s talking about. There was no instance in our meetings with Mr. Obama where he wasn’t well prepared for the questions. This is very good. And after all, he’s simply a very pleasant man with whom it’s a pleasure to deal with.

Wolcott welcomes me into the fold.

Jason Berry publishes the second part of his latest expose of the cult of Marcial Maciel, John Paul II’s favorite, who used money to set up a church within a church, where his morphine abuse, multiple marriages and countless sex abuse victims could be protected and financed. The money was the key to everything from the beginning – money, combined with Francoite politics and reactionary theology. He began his lucrative career by targeting very wealthy Mexican widows. This was a movement fueled by the wealthy, not the poor. Money quote:

After the patriarch’s death, Maciel courted one widow for support. “My mother gave him jewels and a lot of money,” said Roberta Garza. Her mother, now quite aged, “never learned about his kids. He targeted women in Mexico of a certain class who were not allowed to work. I had to fight to go to college. For cultured women who were bored, Maciel offered a sense of purpose.”

Roberta Garza studied as a boarder at Catholic schools in France and Germany, reading voraciously, “developing a critical mind that got me into trouble back in Monterrey.” She returned in 1980 for a Legion high school but found it “rigid, highly traditional, and not analytical. One of my in-laws had a daughter who was not learning English. She complained to the Legionary priest. He actually told her: ‘The final judgment will not be in English.’

“They were grooming us for Regnum Christi — the Movement. If your family had money, power, influence, they wanted you. They kept telling me, ‘God gave you everything, you must give back by fighting the forces of evil.’ … Their whole discourse was this paradise of moral rectitude. After France, where I could think freely, I was crying every night, thinking this is my family, my home, I don’t want to be here. I almost cracked up.”

Maciel, we now know, also abused his own sons when they were children. He wooed their 19 year-old mother, Blanca Bonilla, by posing as “‘Raúl Rivas,’ 57, a self-described widower and international detective for oil companies.”

Though they didn’t marry, he became adoptive father of her 3-year-old son, Omar, from a previous relationship. Bonilla said that the adoption paper and the birth certificates for their natural sons, Raúl, and Christian, now 17, are “legally a mess. Maciel made up his name and gave it to the younger boys.” He was away long stretches as the boys grew. But Blanca Gutiérrez, who grew up poor, had a house and income. “I loved him very much,” she told Aristegui. “I never suspected.”

On the program, Raúl bristled: “When I was 7 years old, I was lying down with him like any boy, any son with his father. He pulled down my pants and tried to rape me.”

Self-effacing in Cuernavaca, careful to not be photographed, “Rivas” began taking Omar and Raúl on trips to Europe, molesting them between the ages of 8 and 14. “As teenagers they began pushing him off,” said Bonilla.

What did the church do when confronted by the first accusations?

This was John Paul II’s favored darling of the church, the man feted by Bill Bennett and Mary Ann Glendon and the entire theocon machine. When a church has become so corrupt it not only allows but celebrates the rise of a pederastic cult within it, it needs not just reform but reformation.

(Photos: Pope Benedict XVI greets seminarians and priests of the Legion of Christ during his weekly general audience on January 7, 2009 at the Paul VI audience hall at the Vatican. By Christophe Simon/Getty.

Jose Barba(L) and Saul Barrales, former seminarians of Legionaries of Christ and victims of Mexican priest Marcial Maciel (85), founder of the order, give an interview to AFP, 19 May 2006. Barba considers that the punishment for sexual abuse the Vatican imposed to the clergyman, does not repair the damage caused during decades to 200 minor seminarians. The Vatican sanctioned Maciel demanding him to stop conducting his ministry in public and live a life of ‘prayer and repentance’. By OmarTorres/AFP/Getty Images)

$12 million since July. In today's conservative world, being a well-oiled media celebrity gets so much more respect than knowing how to govern a state.

This gives you hope: a new book in Israel designed to rally a movement to end the illegal settlements on the West bank. The rationale is a familiar one:

“Israel is a democratic, Jewish state. If we remain in the territories we will have to choose: either Jewish or democratic. It won’t work together, because in a democracy the majority rules and soon [Arabs] will be the majority between the Jordan and the sea. If we want to remain a Jewish state, we will have to deny the rights of the majority and we will turn into an apartheid state. If we insist on remaining democrats, an Arab prime minister will soon be elected by a majority of votes.”

But there's the kicker: the book has been withdrawn from bookstores after a campaign from the far right (i.e. those in Israel who share Sarah Palin's and Bill Kristol's view). Along with this confusing but unsettling news, it reflects something that we need to come to terms with.

It is utopian to believe that Israel will ever withdraw from the lands it has occupied on the West Bank.

Scott Horton on the latest revelations about Henry Kissinger and Operation Condor.