The Dish

Newsweek interviewed Pawlenty. Ugh:

I believe that God created everything and that he is who he says he was. The Bible says that he created man and woman; it doesn't say that he created an amoeba and then they evolved into man and woman.

It's the obviously crafted formula that tickles the gag reflex. "I believe that God created everything and that he is who he says he was." What can this mean? The God that created anything said what where? I presume the Bible, but you'll note he's learned not to be explicitly sectarian, so it's veiled in literalist, fundamentalist code. Double ugh:

My general view on all of this is that marriage is to be defined as being a union of a man and a woman. 

That's by way of regretting votes to protect gays from discrimination in employment and housing.

It's also implicit opposition to any form of civic recognition, including civil unions or domestic partnerships. Triple ugh:

[Palin] is easily as qualified as Barack Obama. I would argue she's more qualified in terms of leadership, experience, management, and supervision—actually running something. She was a mayor, head of an energy commission, and governor.

She is also a pathological fantasist and more proudly ignorant than any leading politician in modern times. Charles Johnson has more here.

Josh:

I think Congressional Dems' attitude toward Obama is sort of on a knife's edge at the moment, especially in the senate. Does this disappointment and upset coalesce and become more public? Or does a mix of excitement, relief or mere exhaustion wash it away and get replaced by a sense that as ugly as it all may have been Obama just passed the first major piece of progressive legislation in more than 40 years?

Yesterday we ran a video showing Iranians booing a message from Khamenei (re-posted above). Juan Cole has the details of its contents:

[Khamenei] accused the grand ayatollah of having been tested by God and of failing the test, but in which Khamenei went on to pray for divine forgiveness for his departed foe. The language of failing the test refers in fundamentalist religion to the assertion of individual ego and refusal to fall quiet when one does not get one's way. Khamenei is saying that Montazeri should have remained quiet about the 1988 massacres of dissidents, and that his standing up for human rights was a sign of human frailty and overpowering ego, which had the potential to undermine the Islamic Republic. Cult-like ideologies always attempt to silence dissidents and to paint dissidence as pure individual selfishness that leads to public turmoil.

The USG Open Source Center translated Khamenei's statement:

In the name of [G]od who is wise and merciful. We are informed that the illustrious scholar Mr Hajj Sheykh Hoseyn-Ali Montazeri has bid Farewell to this mortal coil and has hastened to the afterlife. He was an eminent scholar and an illustrious thinker and many students benefited from him. Much of his life was spent in the service of Late Imam (Khomeyni); he engaged in many jihads and endured much scorn in these endeavors. Towards the end of the Imam's life, (he failed) a difficult and momentous test. I beg almighty god envelope him his mercy and love and to absolve him by accepting the hardships (he) endured in this world as his penance. I his send condolences to his honorable wife and children and I pray for divine mercy and absolution for him.

Mojtaba Zolnour, a cleric and Khamenei's representative to the Revolutionary Guards, also tries to besmirch Montazeri.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 12 pm

Bonus P-town shot after the jump:

Provincetown, Massachusetts, 2.07 pm

"It is possible that Ayatollah Montazeri will prove to be a more influential figure in death than he was in life," – Gary Sick.

Abbas Milani highlights the fascinating life of Ayatollah Montazeri, the once-close pupil and presumed successor to the revolution's first Supreme Leader, Khomeini:

Tensions between Khomeini and Montazeri began when someone on Montazeri's staff leaked the story of secret deals between Iran and the United States–what turned out to be the Iran-Contra Affair. Khomeini executed the staffer, despite protestations from Montazeri. A few months later, as the nation learned of Khomeini’s ill health, Montazeri learned of mass executions in prisons on the order of Khomeini. Prisoners serving time on earlier charges were to be retried–in procedures often lasting no more than a few minutes–and executed if found to be still opposed to the regime. Instead of keeping a pragmatic silence and awaiting Khomeini’s death, as many of his advisors recommended, Montazeri wrote a harshly worded letter to Khomeini condemning the orders, saying that this is not the kind of revolution they had fought for together. This time, the price for protesting murder and moral perfidy was the direct wrath of Khomeini.

More here. The photo above features (from left to right) Rafsanjani, Khomeini, and Montazeri.

A reader writes:

Long time reader from Rwanda. I noticed you recently linked to an article which stated that Rwanda was contemplating introducing a law to criminalize homosexuality as in neighbouring Uganda. It turns out this is not true. Rwanda's Justice Minister recently announced that the rumours were completely false but, even more suprisingly, he said that sex was a private affair that the government would never interfere with. Amazing huh?

And relieving. And what a thrill those first words still provide: "Long time reader from Rwanda." Ah, the Internets.

Megan worries that we can't afford the health care bill:

We still have a gigantic budget deficit pressing on us from Medicare.  Yes, you say you made serious Medicare cuts.  Then you turned around and spent that money on expanding coverage.  So the Medicare deficit, which will be $100 billion and growing in 2019, will still exist.  There will also be growth in the portion of Medicare that is currently paid for out of general revenue, putting further upward pressure on our deficits.  It's impossible to say exactly how much that $100 billion will be growing every year, but $15-20 billion seems like a reasonable estimate, as least during the senescence of the Baby Boomer.

To channel Colbert. Many readers have written that the notion that the 1990s were not a veiled period of war is factually untrue – as al Qaeda prepared in the first WTC attack, the USS Cole and other outrages. Their point is well taken, except that it does seem, all these years later, that our sudden embrace of the war metaphor (and I include myself) may have been over-reach.

It's worth recalling that the US government had the means, information and warning to prevent 9/11 and failed (forgivably) to envisage an attack of that ambition and drama and vileness. And that the attack contained no actual weapons, apart from our own technology, and amounted to 19 nut-job Jihadists. Yes this was a new and potent threat and it came out of the blue for most of us. But one wonders if we took the bait too quickly, if understandably, and would have been better advised not to have junked the 9/10 mindset entirely.

It's also worth recalling that the main neoconservative concern before 9/11 was China, whence the military threat was supposed to emanate. They were itching for a fight and found the 1990s caesura somewhat disorienting. Another reader writes:

Ironically, it is conservatives, more than anybody else, who should be celebrating the triumph of liberalism. They seem far too committed to waging ideological warfare to have noticed it, but on the large

questions they have won, and rather decisively so.

There are compromises to be made, of course. One could not realistically suggest that the welfare state is going anywhere, but where are the grand ideological projects which attempt to radically reorder or improve the nature of men and societies? Where is the threat of social revolution? The overwhelming majority of the Left now accepts capitalism (!), albeit in a more regulated form, with certain redistributive measures and so on.
 
So yes, it could be said that the raison d'être of Neoconservatism is to fight. More precisely, it is to continue to fight the twentieth century. And who can blame them? They are ideologues, and there was never a better time to be so…

And this is why I find Obama a perfectly acceptable pragmatic trimmer to the center-left. His concessions to the conservative era are profound; but he seeks to move on and forward. Conservatives, sadly, want to go back – to the techniques that Gingrich pioneered and Rove finessed. They don't seem to realize that this is what led them into the incoherent wilderness they now angrily occupy.

The global movement keeps gaining traction. In Latin America, Argentina was among the first countries to legalize civil unions, and now the question of civil marriage is on the table:

On November 13th, 2009, Judge Gabriela Seijas once again put Buenos Aires ahead of its neighbors by ruling that the Argentine government must recognize the marriage of José María Di Bello and Alex Freyre, a same-sex couple. This decision makes Argentina the first Latin American country to attempt to institutionalize same-sex marriage. Despite the temporary block of Di Bello and Freyre’s wedding, ordered by a national judge on December 1st, Argentines will soon be engaged in a battle over the deadlocked debate when the country’s Congress and Supreme Court take up the issue in the coming months.

Uruguay, Ecuador and Colombia also have full civil unions for gay couples (although Ecuador does not permit adoption of children). And yesterday, Mexico City became a jurisdiction which allows full civil marriage rights, only a few days after Washington DC (which, of course, is still constrained by the Defense of Marriage Act). In much of this, Spain was the pioneer – proof that a largely Catholic country can allow for secular equality while guaranteeing freedom of worship and thought for the Catholic hierarchy which vehemently opposes any inclusion or rights for same sex couples.

(Photo: Brazilians Marcelo Sales Leite (L), and his groom Roberto Fraga da Silva, participate in a collective gay marriage ceremony, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on June 13, 2009.)