The Dish

by Chris Bodenner

"My goal is to get attacked. If they notice me enough to attack me I will declare victory," – blogger and former high school president Mickey Kaus, on his decision to run against Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

by Jonathan Bernstein

Yesterday was election day in Texas, and I voted.  And I voted.  And then I voted some more.  If my count was correct, I voted fifty-two times.  I voted for Governor, and I voted for U.S. House and Texas House and Texas Senate…OK, I didn't actually know the candidates for the state legislature, by I did feel a bit guilty about that.  I voted for Lt. Governor (which is a big deal here in Texas).  I voted for Attorney General, and Commissioner of the General Land Office, and Commissioner of Agriculture, and Railroad Commissioner.  I don't know what the General Land Office is, no.  I voted for judges — judicial judges, and the county judge, who is the head of the county government, not a judicial judge at all.  I voted for more real judges.  We know someone who is running for "Judge, County Probate Court No. 2."  I voted for her.  I voted for District Clerk.  I don't know what kind of district the District Clerk is clerk for.  I'm pretty sure it's not pronounced the British way, though.  I voted for party chair…actually, Party Chairman, although I voted for a woman, but what do I know? 

Fifty-two times.

There are democratic nations in which you can vote every time they let you, and you might not reach fifty-two marks on a paper your whole life.  Here in Texas though…well, no candidate reached 50% in any of these elections, there will have to be a run-off election.  If Kay Bailey Hutchison really resigns as she's promised, now that she was drubbed in her attempt to be Governor, well, that'll be another election (or two?  I don't remember how Texas handles it; I lived in California last time Texas had a Senate special).  I have no idea whether there will be any other elections, but of course in November we'll have the general election, and I'll get to vote another fifty-one times (everything, I assume, except the party office). 

There are a lot of democratic nations in which you can vote every time they let you and not reach one hundred marks on a touch screen your whole life. 

In the two-year cycle here in Texas, we also have municipal elections in the odd-numbered years, plus local school board elections, various authorities and boards (including local school boards) elections, and elections in which we vote on very obscure changes to the state constitution, which generally get no publicity and hardly any voters.  In other words, something like 150 circled-in bubbles over a two year cycle. 

And Texas isn't bad at all!  I've voted in both Arizona and California, which have pages of judges to vote on and often a dozen or more initiatives and other ballot measures (although there are states, I know, that aren't nearly as bad).  

I love elections, and I do believe that one mark of a strong democracy is keeping the politicians, and not bureaucracies, in charge of lots of things.

But this is ridiculous.  The correct word for most of the elections that happened in Texas today, and that happen in primary elections around the nation all spring and summer this year, is farce.  No one has any idea what they're doing (especially in primaries, and in nonpartisan elections, in which you don't even get a useful cue about what to do).  I like the idea that Americans vote more often and for more things that just about any other nation, but we could vote for about a third of what we vote for now and still be very high on the scale, and people wouldn't have to fee like idiots on election day.  I've never heard a good defense for most of it, and I really think we should cut it out.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

So let me get this straight: the D.C. archdiocese’s opposition to marriage equality trumps its affirmative commitment to celebrating marriage writ large? I thought marriage was sacrament. Shouldn't the Church's policies at a minimum support and affirm the sacraments?

And how come the other marriages that the church considers invalid didn't cause such a stir? Another reader:

I note that Catholic Charities chose the cheapest option on the table, which not only avoids providing benefits to same-sex spouses (and roommates, parents, and other adults as under the Archdiocese of San Francisco's plan) but to any spouses at all. Great way to trim the budget in a recession. Way to go! And note that employees' children apparently will still be covered, even if one of their (legally married) parents is not. That will do wonders for the Church's stated purpose of strengthening the institution of the family, I am sure.

The irony is that Catholic Charities has several programs providing health care to the uninsured, which will now include spouses of the agency's employees.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

Whenever I read about Cheney and her ilk's galling demands that the government abdicate due process of law because they're more frightened of people in caves than our forebears were of the Soviet Union or Axis powers, I always think of John Adams and the Boston Massacre. I can only imagine what would be said today of someone who defended alleged terrorists if they were to run for high office. Adams' infamy over defending, and winning, a case for the hated British was eventually seen for what it was: a defense of liberty.

I couldn't find a clip of the courtroom scene from John Adams, the HBO miniseries, but the speech above hits all the right chords. And below is a diary entry of Adams recounting his feelings about defending the eight British soldiers – murder suspects that no other lawyer in Boston would represent. It's a must read for anyone interested in learning from a true Tea Party patriot:

Before or after the Tryal, Preston sent me ten Guineas and at the Tryal of the Soldiers afterwards Eight Guineas more, which were. . .all the pecuniary Reward I ever had for fourteen or fifteen days labour, in the most exhausting and fatiguing Causes I ever tried: for hazarding a Popularity very general and very hardly earned: and for incurring a Clamour and popular Suspicions and prejudices, which are not yet worn out and never will be forgotten as long as History of this Period is read…It was immediately bruited abroad that I had engaged for Preston and the Soldiers, and occasioned a great clamour….

The Part I took in Defence of Cptn. Preston and the Soldiers, procured me Anxiety, and Obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested Actions of my whole Life, and one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country. Judgment of Death against those Soldiers would have been as foul a Stain upon this Country as the Executions of the Quakers or Witches, anciently. As the Evidence was, the Verdict of the Jury was exactly right.

This however is no Reason why the Town should not call the Action of that Night a Massacre, nor is it any Argument in favour of the Governor or Minister, who caused them to be sent here. But it is the strongest Proofs of the Danger of Standing Armies.

by Alex Massie

Isaac Chotiner has a nice piece at TNR on Michael Frayn's classic Fleet Street novel, Towards the End of the Morning. Among his observations:

The most astonishing aspect of Frayn’s novel [published in 1967] is that so many of the dilemmas and complaints of the characters are easily recognizable today.

“He looked anxiously at the rack of galley proofs behind him. He had only seven ‘The Country Day by Day’ columns in print, and he had sworn never to let the Countries drop below twelve. He had a ‘Meditation’ column for each of the next three days—unless Winters had made a cock-up about immaculate conception, in which case he had only two and a half pieces—but he should have had a running stock of fourteen Meditations…But then what about the crosswords? He counted them up miserably. God Almighty he was down to his last eight crosswords! Day by day the presses hounded him; with failing strength he fed them the hard-won pieces of copy which delayed them so briefly. On and on they came! They were catching him up!”

So the hyperactivity of the blogosphere is not completely unprecedented. Nor is the temptation to comment on things about which you know nothing:

"Bob brooded over his book review. ‘Mr. Berringer knows his New York,’ he wrote. A wave of honesty passed over him, and he altered it to ‘Mr. Beringer appears to know his New York.’ The wave of honesty was succeeded by a wave of professionalism, and he altered it back to ‘Mr. Berringer knows his New York.”

Amen to that. I suspect the curators of the Daily Dish will recognise that first point. The second is simply beautifully, and truthfully, made. 

Frayn's novel was published towards the end of one kind of newspaper life and today we're reaching the end of another. Newspapermen, mind you, have a weakness for imagining and pining for the glories of an always just-past Golden Age. Why, recently, I luncheoned with a former editor of mine and we mournfully agreed that the late 1990s were, though we did not appreciate it at the time, years of fat and fun the likes of which we fear we shall not see again. We should have made more of them.

Then again, I suspect there must be many people working in other declining trades for whom journalists' constant reflections upon the evaporated glories* and shabby romance of bygone times must be exceedingly irritating. They'd have a point, too, about all this special pleading. (This self-indulgence, incidentally, was one of the things that made the fifth and final series of The Wire so much less satisfying than each of its predecessors.)

And times change. The old papers weren't necessarily as good as we like to think they were and the internet is as much an opportunity (for the reader at least) as it is a paper-killer. Cacophonous too, of course, but also expert and entertaining, to say nothing of affording opportunities to many who might never have received such a chance had the old closed-shop been maintained. On balance this is more than a good thing, even if it would still be nice to find easier ways to make it all pay…

*I mean lavish expense accounts of course. At the end of my first week in newspapers I (nervously) submitted my expenses only to have them rejected by my section editor. This was disconcerting since I'd made some effort to minimise them. This was not, I soon learnt, the problem: "This newspaper does not travel by bus; it travels by taxi." My first upbraiding and a lesson swiftly learned, I assure you. These days, alas, it travels by bicycle. 

You can email me your newspaper stories or whatnot at alexmassieATgmail.com

by Chris Bodenner

While the Cheneys are busy making scary YouTube videos, Obama continues to execute the war on terrorism:

The Pakistani Taliban confirmed Tuesday that a senior commander wanted in the deadly 2006 bombing of the U.S. consulate in Karachi was killed in a suspected American missile strike in northwestern Pakistan.

DiA:

Guess someone at the CIA or Pentagon didn't get [Cheney's memo that the president is "trying to pretend we're not at war".] There has been a grievous failure to "connect the dots" here: despite overwhelming evidence from Fox News, Mr Cheney, Liz Cheney, Scott Brown and furious other torture supporters, the president, the military and the intelligence services seem not to have understood that they're supposed to think we're not at war. We risk a major attack on cherished narratives if this kind of complacency keeps up.

by Patrick Appel

Larison misunderstands me here:

Advocates of engagement have recognized the crimes of the Iranian regime, but some of us still believe engagement is the most realistic and correct course despite these crimes. If advocates of engagement do not devote a large amount of space to denouncing regime crimes, which everyone finds atrocious and wrong, perhaps it is because we realize that our outrage will do nothing for the regime’s victims. Perhaps it is because we have seen how stoking moral outrage against another government has been used many times in the past to justify destructive policies that will intensify the suffering and difficulties of the people.

How many thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive and how many millions of Iraqis would never have been displaced had we been more concerned with getting our policy towards Iraq right and less concerned with denouncing Hussein’s atrocities (and using them as fodder for war propaganda)? Appel may not agree with this approach, but he should bear it in mind before he concludes that advocates of engagement such as the Leveretts have not recognized and acknowledged regime crimes.

Kevin Sullivan also boxes in my complaint about the Leveretts' ham-handed writing. As I wrote before, one must address the emotional core of opposing foreign policy viewpoints. Larison is a more than able debater, which is why I'm somewhat surprised that he has not recognized the weak points of the Leveretts' writing. My critique is not against their policies, which I am more than willing to entertain, it is against the manner in which they have framed their analysis. The merits of arguments may be all important but let's not pretend that tone and framing have no bearing.

Read the Leveretts June 15th article: Ahmadinejad won. Get over it. The article makes no mention of the protests that had occurred. Read the Dish coverage the week of the op-ed and the week before. Given the chaos after the election, shouldn't someone arguing that Ahmadinejad won explain why hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets?

Many pro-green movement writers have been overconfident, but that does not give the Leveretts a free pass to commit the same sin. When writing against a consensus one needs to be more careful, not less. I've re-read the WPO report Larison uses to buoy the Leveretts' claims about Ahmadinejad winning the election. The report does not explain how strongholds of other politicians went overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad, it recognizes that Iranians might be afraid to admit they voted for Mousavi after the government crackdown, and it admits that some fraud may have occurred. In short, the WPO report is more nuanced than the Leveretts analysis. That Ahmadinejad "artfully quoted Azeri and Turkish poetry " to impress ethnic voting blocks, as the Leveretts wrote in June 15th article, is not sufficient reason to dismiss irregularities of this magnitude. Larison asks:

What is this “strongest evidence” that the Leveretts have ignored?

The strongest argument against engagement with Iran is not that any individual political actor in Iran is irrational, but that the country's leadership is divided against itself and that the warring political fractions are incapable of committing to any sort of international agreement. The green movement added to this disunity. From Larison's response to my last post:

[It] doesn’t make much sense why regime crimes would actually have much bearing on the available policy options. Washington has made strategically valuable bargains with authoritarian states several times in the past, and our government has done this with regimes that were vastly more repressive, violent and cruel. The opening to China has served both U.S. and Chinese interests reasonably well, and the Chinese people have benefited some from this as well, and none of this would have happened had our government been swayed by the objection that the Chinese government at that time had been killing hundreds of thousands of its own people for years. Out of necessity or interest, we have forged alliances with some genuinely awful Arab and Central Asian regimes as well. Where then does the horrified reaction to negotiating with Iran come from?

This is all the more frustrating because making a comprehensive settlement with Iran is the best and the most realistic option there is. Trying to build up Iran’s opposition or wait for its eventual success is a waste of effort and time that we cannot really afford.

He's right that the national interest has demanded that we deal with much more murderous regimes. My sensitivity to human rights abuses in Iran was heightened by spending the month after the election steeped in Iranian news, tweets, images, and videos. A reader's description of the feeling at the time:

Twitter revolution in a nutshell: Anne Frank's diary. Live. Multiplied by millions.

Perhaps this warped by perspective. When you see an Iranian citizen die for want of a freer society there is a natural impulse to fit that event into the larger order. Watching it over, and over, and over again compels one to find a larger purpose. To explain the human suffering as purchasing some unseen greater good.

If the people of Iran had overthrown their government, all of those deaths, tortures, and arrests would have been given meaning. If the green movement eventually leads to a reformed and freer Iran then those sacrifices will likewise have been worth it. This was the emotional core of the Iran debate at the time of the Leveretts' writing. Is it much of a surprise that their analysis, which gave no quarter to the protesters, was so widely panned? Is it so much to ask that a foreign policy analyst writing in this context in some way address the local and international consequences of such protests?

Today on the Dish we continued to cover a slow news week with our bevy of guest-bloggers. Jonathan Bernstein explained why he's confident healthcare reform is a done deal, wondered how the bill will affect the midterm elections, theorized over what makes an effective president, and mused over 2012 contenders.

Alex Massie floated the idea that a defeat would be a good thing for either party in the upcoming British election, discussed the repercussions of US-style debates, mulled over the immigration factor, cast a critical eye at Clinton's Falkland comments, and knocked Roger Ailes for his hysteria over Iran.

Graeme Wood illustrated Iran's vulnerability to earthquakes, highlighted blasphemy laws in Pakistan, and suggested China as a new partner against the Taliban. Patrick continued his Leveretts debate with Larison.

In other Dish coverage, Liz Cheney cranked up her crusade against the rule of law, Catholic Charities discontinued all of its spousal benefits, Uganda villain Martin Ssempa started blogging, Nathaniel Frank insisted we not delay in ending DADT, Peter Beinart prodded Obama to push out Rangel, Packer exposed a big weakness for Mitch Daniels in '12, and Michael Singh disagreed with our use sanctions.

In Olympics blogging, we linked to a stunning series of photos, provided a visual history of branding, and pointed out a bunch of poor sports. In random viral goodness, check out this music video out of India, this pwnage of Politico, this lampooning of Obama's prompter, and this dose of movie hathos.

— C.B.