The Dish

It's here and we just have to get used to it:

Many plots have been foiled since 9/11, and many disasters averted. But that only dramatizes the point: in this war the enemy needs to succeed once in a few years, but the West has to succeed every time, every day, against overwhelming odds. You can see why a terrified official such as Dick Cheney coined the 1% solution: arguing that maximum force should be used to prevent a terror strike even if the odds of it occurring were less than 1%. And yet with Cheney unleashed, the rule of law suspended, countless Jack Bauers sent to do their worst, and the Geneva conventions junked, the war was largely lost in Afghanistan, bungled hopelessly in Iraq, and still out of reach of the CIA within America. Last November, a suicidal jihadist struck at Fort Hood, a military base in Texas, shooting dead 13 people. Last week, a suicide bomber was able to penetrate a CIA base in Afghanistan, walk into the gym, and kill seven CIA officers, wounding many more. This is a new and flat and dangerous earth. There is no safety in it. With extremists more globally connected than before and destructive technology constantly evolving to stay a few steps ahead of the technology trying to detect it, the world now knows the security of the past is over. As long as there is an ideology powerful enough to inspire individuals to kill themselves to kill others, civilisation will be vulnerable. If this truth resonated across our concept of national security, asymmetry, fuelled again by technology, was just as destructive elsewhere. Remember the music industry?

It’s all but disappeared in a decade, as downloading tracks and concerts have replaced the concept of selling CDs.

Remember newspapers? You’re probably still holding one in your hands — but not for much longer. The model in which an organisation employs reporters, editors and writers, and packages them all together with advertisements printed on forests of dead trees, is coming to an end. In America, the devastation is mind-blowing, as papers shut left and right. The flow of free information, pioneered by random bloggers, is too vast to be reined in by pay-walls any more. The talent required to get readers to pay up has already embarked on new adventures. The new moguls will own nothing, but be at the centre of everything.

Celebrity, the last rampart that separated the glamorous few from the chavtastic many, also slipped past the cracks of institutional control. The line separating Susan Boyle and Paris Hilton from Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin blurred into a new zone of celeb-reality.

In politics, the central control of the moneyed interests and the partisan Pooh-Bahs slipped away on the internet as well, as Barack Obama showed that a spontaneous, web-based fundraising organisation could outsmart the most established party machine — and win. In Iran, an entire generation of young people, immune to the stultifying lies and threats of their moribund leaders, seized control of the phoney elections. Armed only with mobile phones and tweets, they turned a revolution upside down. And they have advanced the inevitable death of the Islamic republic by decades.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (L) and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin talk while skiing in Krasnaya Polyana near the Black Sea resort of Sochi, in southern Russia on January 3, 2010. By Dmitry Astakhov/AFP/Getty.

I really did have a better Christmas this season but the new year has reminded me of some simple things. Like clockwork, our heater gave out two days ago. It's freezing out there! The repairman is supposed to come tomorrow morning and meanwhile we're relying on space heaters and the beagles are looking at us as if some core aspect of our bargain has been betrayed. About that food and shelter …

And then a tooth-ache that almost certainly means that that wisdom tooth I refuse to have removed until I am screaming in agony needs to come out. Do I call the dentist tomorrow? Or do I wuss out again?

This NYT piece has gone whizzing round the tubes. It has an appealingly counter-intuitive appeal: the older you get, the more wisdom you acquire, but that wisdom is only accessible if the brain is constantly challenged outside its comfort zone. The brain, to get the benefit of age, needs to capture some of the adventurism of youth.

A reader writes:

This may be the posting from the

right that is the most obvious and damning incidence of racism that I have yet seen, more so even than photoshopped images of Obama as a witch-doctor

or a shoe-shine boy.

The statement from the commenter, approved by Reynolds – that the fact that the photo was on the White House's flickr page was proof that "they don't see what we see" – showed clearly what type of world-view was fueling his adverse reaction to this photograph. No explicit words are needed.

The truth of the matter is, the commenter is 100% accurate. They look at this photo, and they can't help themselves. They see Obama as not knowing his "place", being "uppity" and, as you put it, "condescending" to a white man. What they do not seem to realize, is that their seeing this as somehow damaging to Obama is an indictment of themselves, not of the President.

My favorite Hot Air contender for a caption:

$100 a gram. $90 if you buy a quarter oz.

An on-air message to Tiger Woods:

"The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith. He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger would, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."

The pure sectarianism of this comment – its adoption of the once-secular stage of political journalism to insert a call for apostasy – is striking. It even seemed to catch Bill Kristol off-guard a little. But it has long been established that non-evangelical Christians have at best an auxiliary role in today's religiously defined GOP, and the slow morphing of Fox News into the 700 Club is not exactly new. What earthly reason do these pundits now have to prevent or stop it? Once you have abolished the distinction between secular and religious discourse, as they routinely insist on doing, their politics is their religion and their religion is their politics. And both are corrupted.

That's what Marc Thiessen labels people who oppose torture. Friedersdorf notes:

Even the most cursory reflection on history demonstrates how blinkered this argument is. Were the Americans who fought World War II but objected to torturing knowledgeable German and Japanese POWs therefore radical pacifists? Are decorated combat veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq suddenly transformed into pacifists when they raise objections to waterboarding? […T]he obvious and incontrovertible fact [is] that plenty of of killing you. But when you have captured the enemy, when he is utterly under your control, tied naked to chair by shackles in a cell, the morality of the use of force shifts dramatically. When you unleash violence against him when he cannot defend himself, you have crossed a core moral line.

Everyone can appreciate the distinction between inflicting violence on an enemy who can inflict violence back and inflicting violence on someone who is already captured, restrained and under your control. Opposing the latter is not pacifist, let alone radically pacifist. It is simply moral, and reflects a moral distinction that I'd wager comes as close to natural law as we are ever going to get (and as close to a core Christian principle if ever there is one).

The Christian distinction Thiessen and Cheney reject – and the core of the heresy they embrace – is that between self-defense and cruelty. Because they believe that the US is inherently good and its enemies inherently evil, they cannot conceive that they themselves are just as capable of evil as al Qaeda. But you are, Dick, you are. Yes: calm, old, unruffled old Cheney – just as prone to absolute evil as Osama bin Laden or me or anyone mortal. It is not conservative to believe that human nature has changed just because you now have power. It is not conservative to believe that the threat you are grappling with is somehow uniquely different from every other threat ever made against a free people and therefore merits the secret but irrevocable trashing of ancient norms of morality and central pillars of a just war. That's as radical as it gets.

Real conservatives – not the neo-fascist version favored by Cheney and Yoo and Addington – know this. They know they are not inherently good, even when they are fighting evil. They therefore protect themselves and their own civilization from the cancer of torture.

Churchill, to cite an obvious example, opposed torture absolutely and insured that captured Nazi spies in Britain were interrogated humanely even as Britain was being bombed without mercy; and he was not a radical pacifist. Reagan opposed torture in all circumstances, fought the Cold War and also signed the UN Convention against torture; and he was not a radical pacifist. John Paul II opposed torture in all circumstances; and he was not a radical pacifist. The entire just war tradition rules even contemplating torture as out of bounds – and its entire point is to construct a non-pacifist Christianity, to make the evil of war defensible, to restrict violence at all times to strong moral boundaries because wars so easily slip outside moral strictures and engulf us all, and yet wars are also sometimes necessary. In grasping this, as he has done from the start and proved most memorably in his Oslo speech, it is Obama who is currently rescuing the conservative tradition from itself.

Thiessen's premise, of course, is also open to extreme challenge.

We simply do not know because we do not have access to all the data what torture did or did not reveal as it was deployed by Cheney and Bush in every theater of war against hundreds of prisoners of war. Many with direct access to the data dispute Cheney's chief hagiographer on these counts. But even if it were true, it would still not prove that other traditional means of intelligence gathering could not have gained exactly the same intelligence, without all the lies and red herrings that torture always conjures up.

But to my main point: I oppose torture because I am not a pacifist; because I believe that evil exists in the world and needs to be challenged by force at times; because I believe that maintaining civilized restraints and rules for the use of that force is essential if it is not to slip out of our control; and because I believe that the power to torture so poisons the line between truth and falsehood, so blurs the distinction between good and evil, so empowers tyranny within a system dedicated to human freedom … that it threatens to destroy the soul and civilization of all those who wield it, let alone those who wield it with pride and certainty and utter lack of accountability, as Cheney and his neo-fascist goons did.

This is an ancient and eternal human struggle against the temptations of power. It is what Tolkien was writing about when he constructed the concept of a ring of utter power that destroys those who wield it. And yet Thiessen and his cohorts on the neo-fascist right do not merely regard the ring as rightly and eternally theirs' but they show no compunction whatever in using it, in attempting to integrate it within the system of American government, and on insisting on its routine use as a means of tackling something as vague as what Thiessen calls "active threats". 

That is as evil as the forces we are fighting. And it fatally wounds the moral basis of the fight. We fight not just to win at any price. If we were to become a fundamentalist police state that deployed torture at home and abroad against Muslim threats, the war would already be over, and al Qaeda would have won. We fight for certain profound and enduring principles – of freedom of religion and conscience and the inviolable dignity of the individual human being. We cannot defend those principles if we trash them at the same time. And no one – no one – is morally pure enough to survive the temptation.

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Glenn Reynolds finds a photo in the White House Flickr basket and publishes it to, er, point out how bad the White House's p.r. is, or how blind they are to perceptions of Obama or some such thing. I tried to puzzle this one out and can just about see how an elusive photo of a tired Obama reacting to something unknowable might make him look tired or arrogant or something.

And then I realized why this photo immediately strikes some people are damning. Obama is a black man who looks as if he is condescending to a white man. That's political gold. As one of his readers notes:

“If I really wanted to set my dad off, all I’d have to do is send him this photo. The amazing thing is, that it is found on the WH’s flickr page. Proving that they don’t see what we see.”

Not that Reynolds would ever stoop to such a thing.

"I'm very disappointed in the vice president's comments. I'm neither a Republican nor a Democrat — I've worked for the past five administrations. And either the vice president is willfully mischaracterizing this president's position — both in terms of language he uses, and the actions he's taken — or he's ignorant of the fact. And in either case, it doesn't speak well of what the vice president's doing. The clear evidence is that this president has been very, very strong…” – John Brennan.

Cheney is, of course, deliberately mischaracterizing, i.e. knowingly lying, about the current president.

“You really think this kid can‘t be convicted? You really think we don‘t have enough evidence beyond the—beyond the, I don‘t know, 300 or so eyewitnesses who were on the plane? The fact that we have the weapon that he tried to use? The fact that he confessed? You think that‘s not enough to get this kid convicted? You have that little faith in our criminal justice system? That little faith in the rule of law? You don‘t believe that a supermax federal American prison is capable of holding this kid? 

You think it might be cool, instead, to martyr this kid as some impressive soldier, instead of some idiot confused rich kid who couldn‘t even handle blowing up his own junk with a bomb that was secreted in his own underpants? We‘re supposed to take national security advice from you guys? Really?” – Rachel Maddow, the anti-Mike-Allen.