The Dish

Today on the Dish we discovered that Bill Sparkman's death was actually a suicide staged as murder. Malkin pounced on our prior coverage of the bizarre event. Also, Britain tortured.

In Palin drama, she accused the commander-in-chief of ignoring those in his command, brandished her foreign policy acumen, and read a bedtime story on the bus. Another victim of her fabrication spoke out, Chris Orr can't understand why she's going after a teenager, a female reader sized up her sex appeal, and Weigel explained why she is a better celebrity than public servant.

In other commentary, Andrew fisked the GOP's Ten Commandments, Friedersdorf lampooned Beck's latest insanity, Peter Beinart singled out Lieberman for a partisan tantrum, Larison followed up, and Tyler Cowen tackled our thinking over debt.

Lastly, don't forget: Barack Obama gave you homework.

— C.B.

Douthat counters Matt Yglesias and Isaac Chotiner:

[T]he example of [Newt] Gingrich — the way that he’s sought after as a wise man by Republicans, and the way that both the right-wing media and the mainstream press tend to give him more credit as a thinker than he deserves — suggests that precisely because the G.O.P. currently has a reputation for being anti-intellectual, there’s a huge upside for a Republican politician in being identified as that rarest of species — a “conservative with domestic policy ideas.” (For a small-bore example of how this works, look at Paul Ryan, who’s made a substantial name for himself by being one of the few House Republicans willing to get into the weeds on health care reform.) Of course identity politics and symbolic appeals will always matter more than substance, and political careers will never be made on wonkery alone. But even — or especially — in today’s Republican Party, being known as a thoughtful politician seems much more likely to help you than to hurt you.

Joe Klein notes that Max Boot acknowledges some U.S. forces appear "a bit worn down and pessimistic" in conversations regarding Afghanistan. Klein sighs:

[Boot] thinks morale would improve markedly if the President uses the word "victory" in his Afghanistan rollout next week. But "victory" is a word that was never used by David Petraeus in Iraq–it was only used by unsophisticated bully-raggers like John McCain–and it is a word that would be laughable if applied to Afghanistan (just as it remains fairly implausible when applied to Iraq). Success is a better word than "victory," less bellicose, more in keeping with the spirit of counter-insurgency doctrine.

A fascinating story that should lead to more research and study, especially with children:

Building off that Peter Beinart post, Larison diagnoses Lieberman:

Looked at from either side of the spectrum, Lieberman has been anything but interesting. He has been the reliable defender of the “centrist” consensus established in the ’90s that finally accepted welfare reform and insisted on U.S. hegemony abroad. In practice, this “centrism” can be used to justify the most extreme, violent and destructive policies, but it is considered reasonable and acceptable because it does not partake of “fringe” ideas and enjoys the support of respectable, “serious” people.

She’s been on a roll today artfully declaring that this blog drew the conclusion that Bill Sparkman was murdered by neo-confederate thugs. Here’s her formulation:

Andrew Sullivan pointed his finger at “Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts” in a post titled “No Suicide,” which decried the “Kentucky lynching.”

And again:

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan immediately fingered “Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts.”

What I actually wrote – and you can click the link for the full quote – was:

It’s possible, I suppose, that anger at the feds in general could make a drug dealer murder a census worker. But the most worrying possibility – that this is Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts – remains real. We’ll see.

Notice Malkin’s formulation: “pointed his finger” or “immediately fingered.” I said the “possibility” remained real and that “we’ll see.” How can you finger someone when you simultaneously say we do not yet know what happened for sure?

Two days later, I wrote that, “We still don’t know very much about the death of Bill Sparkman in a brutal scene in Kentucky.” In my first post, I wrote:

From this profile of the cancer survivor and volunteer, it appears suicide is unlikely. We’ll find out.

I subsequently linked to a story that proved that the case was getting murkier. In other words, although I clearly suspected foul play and believed it wasn’t suicide, I drew no firm conclusions about the actual perpetrators of this act. In every post, I made sure readers knew that the investigation was ongoing and we did not yet know the full facts. And at every opportunity, this blog linked to stories pushing back against the idea that this was a murder.

Malkin is a journalist in the sense that I am “far-left.”

Nate Silver's qualified answer:

[If] Obama can defeat a Generic Republican with an approval rating of X, he can defeat Palin with an approval rating of X-3. Caveats abound, of course — this conclusion too is based on some fairly limited evidence. But if you told me that Obama's Gallup approval rating was 45 percent on Election Eve 2012 and that his opponent was Sarah Palin, I'd put my money on Obama and feel pretty good about it.

"There is a reason you don't have Mexican beer cartels planting fields of hops in the California forests," – Bruce Merken, Marijuana Policy Project.

(Hat tip: Reason)