The Dish

The tea-party brigade rallies against a civil trial for tortured terror suspect and alleged 9/11 architect, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed:

"I take Sarah Palin seriously, I take America seriously, I take her ideas seriously. Do you NOT take her seriously? Should I have picked up a four hundred page book and assumed it was error riddled fluff, but that is o.k. because it was just for the folks? How condescending is that? People are not well served when it is assumed any old dumb thing will do for us if it strokes our egos and tells us what we believe. That is the real snobbery.

My grandfather never got to go to high school, but he wanted his political heroes (men like Bob Taft and Eisenhower) to give it to him straight and to get it right. He wanted men of substance. He read his paper and his King James Bible every day and he would have had no time for books like “Going Rogue” that take his hard earned money, but don’t bother with the most basic fact check," – John Mark Reynolds, a Palin voter and supporter, writing in the Christianist journal, First Things.

It's easily the best review of the book I've read.

This question

Should I have picked up a four hundred page book and assumed it was error riddled fluff, but that is o.k. because it was just for the folks?

is actually best directed at the editor of this book, Adam Bellow, a man of great intellect and learning. How proud is Bellow of a book that quotes made-up Plato and Aristotle, culled from QuoteGarden web sources that have no actual citations and cannot be traced to either Plato or Aristotle? 

How proud is Bellow of a book that makes an elementary fact-check 101 error, mistaking a quote from John Wooden when it was from John Wooden Leg and meant the opposite of what was intended?

Is Bellow really not paid enough to find these things and prevent them from being published?

Does he regard the job of an editor as not checking to see whether transparent, freshman college year bullshit is included? Yes, some errors will always seep through and the internal incoherence of the book is enough to make any editor simply throw up his hands at making any sense of it. But these basic errors, correctable in five minutes with Google?

What's interesting is that a right-of-center blogger was able to edit and fact-check this book in ways that Adam Bellow and Jonathan Burnham and an army of professional publishing fact-checkers couldn't or decided didn't matter.

What it reveals is the real elitism and condescension toward Palin's base exists … at Harper Collins.

A reader writes:

I really enjoy when you post things like this.  I grew up in Washington Heights in Manhattan and am a product of B-Boy culture.  I spent half my teenage years in house parties just like the one in the video, breaking and rapping and drinking and laughing and having a great time.  Language aside, we really aren’t very different from the people of Iran despite the effort our politicians and media exert in making us think so.

Tomorrow is student day in Iran. Pray for them. The Dish will be covering.

“I am entertained every time I see these people attack her and attack her and attack her. She’s irrelevant, but they continue to attack her. I am so proud of her and the work that she is doing,” – John McCain on Sarah Palin. I think he meant the "irrelevant" adjective to apply to those who both call her that and yet attack her.

But, look, this blog does not for a minute believe Palin is irrelevant. I think she's the de facto leader of the GOP at this point, certainly more so than McCain. And all the critics are doing is holding her to a basic standard: a) is what she says true? and b)  what policies does she propose for the problems we face? The answers we can glean at this point are: mostly no; and nothing but cliches and drilling for oil.

This blog, moreover, does not believe that Sarah Palin is the real issue here. The real issue is the McCain campaign and the mainstream media. I'd really prefer it if Sarah Palin had never come onto the national scene just as I devoutly wish that the US had not authorized torture. But she did and Cheney did. What I refuse to do is just pretend none of this happened and that it doesn't matter.

With all due respect to someone who really shouldn't be as exposed as she is: No one this unhinged, this unvetted and this delusional should have been allowed to be foisted on a national ticket and be one heart-beat away from a job she isn't faintly qualified for. If we discover that the McCain campaign simply ignored or the press simply avoided issues that cut to the core of this candidate's integrity, honesty and candor, then the system is broken. And we need to fix it. We cannot fix it until we identify the problem accurately.

That's all we're trying to do. That's our job. It's what the press is for. A media that is deferent to un-fact-checked propaganda from someone already shown to be a compulsive truth-rigger is not doing its job. And what public servants are for is answering such valid factual questions promptly, plainly and with proof if necessary. I do not believe the problem is with those in the blogosphere asking questions that have factual answers. I believe the problem is a system where the political and media elites do not think it matters if what a leading politician says is true or false. 

Once the system has stopped caring about that, the game is over. The Dish will do all it can to insist that these normal rules be maintained. And that we are able to know for sure whether what powerful people are saying is true or false.

A cogent case for declaring the entire Trig story worth retiring immediately.

Peter Beinart compares:

The best precedent for all this is what Nixon did in the late Vietnam years. For roughly two decades, the U.S. had been trying to contain "communism" — another ominous, elastic noun that encompassed a multitude of movements and regimes. But Vietnam proved that this was impossible: the U.S. didn't have the money or might to keep communist movements from taking power anywhere across the globe. So Nixon stopped treating all communists the same way. Just as Obama sees Iran as a potential partner because it shares a loathing of al-Qaeda, Nixon saw Communist China as a potential partner because it loathed the U.S.S.R.

Nixon didn't stop there. Even as he reached out to China, he also pursued détente with the Soviet Union. This double outreach — to both Moscow and Beijing — gave Nixon more leverage over each, since each communist superpower feared that the U.S. would favor the other, leaving it geopolitically isolated. On a smaller scale, that's what Obama is trying to do with Iran and Syria today. By reaching out to both regimes simultaneously, he's making each anxious that the U.S. will cut a deal with the other, leaving it out in the cold. It's too soon to know whether Obama's game of divide and conquer will work, but by narrowing the post-9/11 struggle, he's gained the diplomatic flexibility to play the U.S.'s adversaries against each other rather than unifying them against us.

(Hat tip: Weekly Standard)

What are the chances?:

(Hat tip: Sager)

Catholicism has all but destroyed itself in one of its most sacred grounds, Ireland. The revelations of decades of serial abuse, sadism, cruelty and neglect of children in its care, and its hierarchy's callous, persistent and evil cover-up of the same, has led many Irish to wash their hands of this corrupt institution entirely. If it were a secular institution that had engaged in this kind of horror, any government would force its immediate closure and prosecution of its top officials. Instead we have this statement from the spokesman for the diocese of Derry:

“There is no good in saying other than the truth. The church at this state has no credibility, no standing and no moral authority. The issue is now one of trust, and that is why it will take the rest of my lifetime as a priest to build up that trust again, because the trust and confidence in the church has been broken on a fundamental level."

At a fundamental level. And yet this perpetrator of a mass conspiracy to abuse and rape children, is now threatening in my own diocese to drop its charitable projects because DC is about to legalize marriage equality. It's like listening to Karl Rove lecture on fiscal responsibility and war-management.

David Roberts vents about the challenges involved in energy conservation:

The most puzzling behavioral phenomenon to understand when it comes to building efficiency is that Most People Won’t Do Sh*t (MPWDS). “Most people” includes people who could make money by doing sh*t, people who say they will do sh*t, even people who have promised to do sh*t. I’ve heard from people who write about energy efficiency for a living, know exactly what to do to make their homes more efficient, and still don’t do sh*t. It’s hard to disentangle the reasons why—some mix of status quo bias, hyperbolic discounting, and loss aversion to begin with—but it’s clear that public surveys and polls about this tend to be misleading. What people say they’re willing to do and what they demonstrate they’re willing to do are very different things. Attitudes don’t translate into actions.