The Dish

The Onion nods at the gay tolerance of the younger generation.

The twitterverse finds a new cause célèbre.

(Illustration by Mike Mitchell)

Frum watched Palin's debut:

The longer she appears on TV, the less she will be “from Alaska” and the more she will be “from Fox.” She’s subsuming her brand into somebody else’s. Not for the first time, one wonders as one looks at the Fox-GOP relationship: who’s working for whom here?

In my view, we're seeing the fusion of a political party with a media company. It's like a state-run TV that only runs pro-GOP stories. Think of the TV in Iran and you'll get the fuller picture.

And by sealing off Fox viewers from any other news source, and feeding propaganda 24 hours a day, and having a monopoly of the base, FNC is more powerful than the RNC in determining Republican politics.

Already they have fused with the Tea Party movement, essentially creating and shaping and hyping it. Now they are fusing with the head of that movement, Sarah Palin. Since their idea of government is entirely abstract – they're against it except they're also for Medicare, more war, torture, and no tax hikes, i.e. bankruptcy sooner rather than later – they don't even have to run anything or hold any serious public office. If what makes a good politician is an "instinctual skill-set" then Joe The Plumber or something like that is the Republican pol of the future.

"If the Iranian Revolutionary Guards get the bomb, they won't use it on Israel. They're not so stupid. They certainly won't use it on us," – Hitch.

But Hitch still wants a US invasion of Iran to remove the regime! Here's the money quote:

Hitchens: How many Iranian dissidents are really going to be nationalistically upset by an intervention that comes in and removes the Revolutionary Guards?

Totten: I don't think very many, but I could be wrong.

Hitchens: Would we have the nerve to say that was the objective, or would we simply say we're only talking about sites and don't care about Iranian freedom? We'd need to have a generous view of the situation, and we'd need to coordinate it with NATO. The people who most want this to happen are the Sunni Arab governments.

So even though he believes the US is not directly threatened and Israel is not directly threatened, he wants to commit the US (leaving aside the total unfeasibility of this, given what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan) not to a namby-pamby bombing campaign but a full-scale armed invasion in defense of … Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, and Qatar! I mean: is this supposed to be a serious argument? The point is capped off with this remark:

What's the point of being a superpower if we say to our allies there's nothing we can do about this, that they're on their own?

Interventionism to prove what a big dick you've got?

Yes, that's statesmanship. Speaking of American raw military power as if its profound limits against a global Islamist movement have not been revealed even to the likes of Stanley McChrystal?

As for the wider war on Jihadist terrorism, does Hitchens really believe that the US invading a Muslim country for the third time in a decade would help us drain the swamps of anti-American hatred? If it were done when Obama was president, what does Hitch believe would be the impact on global Muslim opinion – the critical factor in our war with Islamist terror? How does he square what would be a civilizational war in which every Muslim – Sunni and Shia – would unite in hatred of the US and the West? How many lives would be lost in this military tumescence?

Hitchens seems to have returned to the magical thinking that gave us the Iraq occupation:

I sat with some Iranians in Isfahan, with a family I was staying with. They were secular and they served me booze with one of their cousins who was there visiting. She wasn't wearing a full burkha, but a veil. She said the least during our discussion, but at the end she said the most eloquent thing, and she was obviously very tortured about it. She said, "Do you think the Americans could come just for a couple of weeks, remove the regime, and then go?"

A cakewalk, no? And cheap. And few lives lost.

Reuters is live-blogging. Dish blog-tweet-youtube ground-level coverage here, here, here and here. The idea that a quake of this magnitude was not foreseen in Haiti is false.

(Hat tip: Smith)

She doesn't. She can't actually disprove or rebut any of the mounds of evidence that she is and was the most ignorant and unqualified person ever put on a national ticket. All she does is deny, deny, deny:

“I had been warned not to watch it,” said Ms. Palin of the “60 Minutes” segment in question. That segment dealt with a new book on the campaign that alleges, among other things, that Palin did not know why North and South Korea are two different countries.

“That is a lie,” said Palin.

Host Bill O’Reilly of “The O’Reilly Factor” said that Palin couldn’t have bested Vice President Biden in a debate if she were really that dumb, and offered her his show as a base for future anti-“60 Minutes” offensives. “You now have a forum here at Fox News where you can immediately neutralize ’60 Minutes’,” Mr. O’Reilly said.

O'Reilly effectively backs Palin's claim on the basis that her crammed, force-fed burbling of talking points in the Biden debate somehow refutes the idea that she hasn't the slightest clue what goes on in the world or the slightest knowledge of history outside of sports. And he is essentially pledging that News Corporation will advance her lies and spin, as it did by publishing her book, and protect her from any real scrutiny that a political candidate deserves.

Since Fox is a propaganda operation and not a journalistic enterprise (Shep Smith excluded), they don't push back. What FNC is giving her is a platform to lie unchecked by any journalistic ethics.

I do not believe that this means she is out of politics. Au contraire. FNC and the RNC are effectively the same operation (and Harper Collins, which published her fiction as non-fiction with no fact-checking or editing is also part of NewsCorp). Her new job is running for office via the chief propaganda network for the red states. The strategy is obviously to focus entirely on the base, demonizing the president and anything he does, exploit economic malaise, and then get back to power on a wave of frightened white ressentiment with Palin as the hood ornament one more time.

I fear her.

The indifference to reality, the cult-like connection with the gun-clingers, the charisma, the cunning, the fraud: this is like a second Bush utterly unleashed from any connection to the GOP's more civil and expansive past, holding a view of presidential power that establishes a national security protectorate for the indefinite future, and total unseriousness with respect to the debt and defusing Islamist terror – rather than provoking it even further.

At least this time, we will have more than eight weeks to vet her. But when a politician believes she does not need to respond to the press, when in fact she now uses the fiction that she too is the press and should be asking questions of others, when the platform she has been given provides her with total immunity from direct criticism along with a megaphone for lies, we are in trouble as a democracy.

She is a symptom of a broken political and journalistic system. She is not a tabloid story. She is a threat.

The Jennifer Rubin piece has already been brutally taken down by Jon Chait, but David Corn sharpens it. He argues that Rubin’s point is that:

Jews — especially Jewish women — just don’t get real people. It’s not merely that they value academic-proven intelligence in leaders and that they generally don’t cotton to conservatives; they hold true Americans in disdain.

I can see why a conservative anti-Semite would want to present such a case. But for a Jewish author to do so in a Jewish (neoconservative) magazine is a bit odd — and perhaps a touch dangerous. Not that the masses read Commentary. (“It’s beyond strange to see this argument explicitly targeted at Jews, in a Jewish publication of all places,” Chait writes.) Rubin’s piece is reminiscent of the age-old complaint about Jews: they’re cosmopolitan, they think they’re superior, they’re self-alienated from mainstream society. The problem with Sarah Palin for Jews and non-Jews is Sarah Palin. But Rubin contends the true problem is with the Jews — their insularity, their elitism, their conceits. A Jew can only hope that this article does not come to haunt her.

I worry about elements of proto-fascism becoming mainstream in the GOP.

But there is something particularly disturbing about the way in which neoconservatives, in their alliance with the Christianist heartland, increasingly argue for a strong and unchecked charismatic leader in the Palin/Bush mold, a disdain for reason in political life and a yearning for what Rubin calls an “instinctual skill set” in a leader. You can see why Leo Strauss, the neocon mentor, backed Mussolini at the beginning.

Most American Jews, of course, retain a respect for learning, compassion for the other, and support for minorities (Jews, for example, are the ethnic group most sympathetic to gay rights.) But the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing – that celebrates and believes in government torture, endorses the pulverization of Gazans with glee, and wants to attack Iran – is something else.

Something much darker.

A Haitian woman is covered in rubble on January 12, 2010 in Port-au-Prince after a huge earthquake measuring 7.0 rocked the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti, toppling buildings and causing widespread damage and panic, officials and AFP witnesses said. By Lisandro Suero/AFP/Getty.

The Haitian Blogger echoes others' description in saying that the mountainous areas are totally wrecked, and that the structures have just slid down onto each other:

All the poor living on the mountains, in houses build on the mountains, feared suffered heavy, heavy casualty. Our report is that these houses on the mountains tumbled down, one on top another.

A terrible situation! Devastating. There's NEVER been an earthquake of this magnitude in Haiti. Major aftershocks happening…

Someone in Haiti said to me "The are of Kafou is destroyed…the population of Port au Prince has just been REDUCED, don't know by about how much. Everyone, rich and poor, build on the mountains, all the mountains are down! This is going back to the ground zero."

Troy Livesay, a missionary and blogger in Haiti, says the night was spent in total darkness and fear:

The reports that was best from an eyewitness in the hardest hit area of Carrfour was by Tipap … he works with our family and he said that he saw "many many bodies" and that churches, schools, and homes had collapsed. He was in a Tap Tap (truck for public transportation) when it happened.