The Dish

Andrew Exum is not a Seymour Hersh fan:

My theory is that Hersh's journalism is a little like a 12-gauge shotgun. He just lets it go, and something is bound to hit the target. But each year, it seems, another inch is shaved off the barrel, so the shot group gets wider and wider. Over time, fewer and fewer pellets actually hit the target, but such is his reputation that people only remember the articles of his that actually exposed something new and none of the articles that, in retrospect, turned out to be just crazy talk.

Over the weekend, I suggested that we should not be afraid to define those against marriage equality. Dreher counters:

Dropping the "Bigot" Bunker-Buster doesn't seem like a promising strategy to me in a country in which 49 percent of the people think homosexuality is immoral, and in which a Mr. Nice Gay approach is slowly but steadily winning. But we'll see. If that's the way they go, the anti-SSM groups ought to make ads out of this footage of the way an enraged mob of No More Mr. Nice Gays chased peaceful Christians out of the Castro district; the Christians had to be accompanied by police officers for their own safety.

In fact, I was not in any way arguing that we should yell "bigot!" even more loudly. I was suggesting that we keep making the positive constructive case for marriage equality – that it's socially unifying, that it fosters responsibility and family, that it encourages people to look after one another rather than relying on government, that it's humane, that it helps give troubled gay kids hope, that it prevents divorces, and on and on. But in this war, we should not always be the ones on the defensive. We can and should also point out the hypocrisy and history of our opponents.

Is it not somewhat bizarre that the Catholic church, which has perpetrated and covered up abuse, rape and molestation of children on a massive, global scale, should be financing a campaign that says that it is some kind of abuse that gay kids know that they can have a relationship one day like their parents'?

Is it not repulsive that a church like the Mormons, which taught for a majority of its existence that African-Americans were marked as damned by God and that no black person could be a Mormon, should now be a chief financier of a campaign to deny another minority civil rights? Are we not entitled to illuminate just how rotten these institutions are on these questions of children and civil rights? Are we not entitled to insist that the use of church funds to run clear political campaigns against minorities should result in an end to their tax-exempt status?

As for that "mob", it was a handful of Christianists who, not content with using democratic means to strip their fellow citizens of civil rights, decided to celebrate their victory by haranguing gay people as the bars closed in Castro Street the weekend after Prop 8. Please.

I would like to ask Rod if the gay mobs he feared would be showing up at his doorstep ever actually showed up. Or whether his own terror of homosexual orientation might have warped his grip on reality?

A reader writes:

The reader who wrote that the children shouldn't be surprised by their parents' arrival home because it adds on more time to their worrying is off base. When my son came home on leave and then permanently from Afghanistan we did not know when his exact date of arrival would be. We were given a window in which to expect him. He called me one day to say his leave would begin sometime in the next two weeks and it would take up to a week to get home. I heard from him 12 days later to let me know he was in Dallas and would land in Houston in about 3 hours.

Same thing when he was due home for good. Just got a call one evening saying he had landed at Ft. Bragg and was safe. I knew he was supposed to be home somewhere in the 30 day window but no idea when.

Waiting for that window is a hard, hard thing. You don't know if they are truly coming. Or if something has happened and they canceled leaves. Or something happened to them along the way.  It is nerve wracking and my husband and I had many sleepless nights waiting for "the window". I imagine many spouses here in the states are not telling their children that mommy or daddy is coming home because they don't want to visit this prolonged waiting and worrying upon them. Leave the spouses alone. They are making the best decisions they can in a bad situation.

Another writes:

I've been on many deployments during my career in the Navy and as strange as it might sound to a civilian, they become routine after awhile. The only homecoming my family ever talks about is the one where I walked in the front door a week early, and that includes the homecoming after spending a year in Iraq. If I had called from the airport in Europe to tell everyone Dad was on his way home, that homecoming would have been lost with all the others. It's not about putting it on youtube, it's about making coming home more special than it already is.

Watch and weep through your laughter:

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Today's NYT really brings it home:

The list of medals awarded to Sergeant Garza (no relation to the district attorney) tell of a good soldier. After two tours in Iraq, he shared a tight bond with unit members and missed them greatly when the Army sent him to a base in Georgia for additional training after a second deployment. He was troubled by a breakup with a girlfriend. And though he seldom spoke with his family about his combat tours, he once confided to his mother that he had a killed a person in Iraq. “He said, ‘It was him or me,’ ” Ms. Smith said. “But you could tell it troubled him.”

His family believes he did not get the care he needed, despite signs he had fallen into despair.

In June, he left the Georgia base without permission, and the Army tracked him to a hotel room in Paris, Tex. In a suicide note he sent to a friend before leaving, he said he wanted to end it close to his friends. Among his purchases was a shotgun.

Sergeant Garza was brought back to Fort Hood and committed for psychiatric care, first to a civilian hospital because there was no room at the base hospital, said his uncle, Gary Garza, who lives in Killeen. After three days, he was transferred to the base hospital. He was released after two weeks and assigned to take outpatient counseling.

“We thought he was doing better,” said his grandfather, Homer Garza, a retired command sergeant major who served in Korea and Vietnam and who himself had silently suffered for decades with post-traumatic stress. In fact, Sergeant Garza had shared misgivings about his treatment at the base hospital with his uncle. “He said he felt like he was getting really good treatment at the civilian hospital,” his uncle said. “He said the civilian doctors seemed to care more. And for the military doctors, it was just like a job for them.”

True or not, on July 7 Sergeant Garza received a message on his cellphone canceling what was to be his first outpatient appointment. Though his family says the Army was supposed to be checking his apartment for guns and alcohol, that Sunday he put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.

His mother later listened to the message. “They said, ‘Sorry, we don’t have a counselor for you today,’ ” Ms. Smith said. “ ‘If you don’t hear back from us by Monday, give us a call.’ ”

Frum reads Continentti’s Palin puff piece:

Palin supporters have constructed an alternative reality in which their heroine is wildly cheered by the American yeomanry, and despised only by a small coterie of sherry-drinking snobs. No contrary evidence, no matter how overwhelming and uncontradicted, can alter this view: not the collapse in Palin’s support in just 5 weeks in 2008, not the statistical studies that show her as the only vice presidential nominee in ticket to have hurt her ticket, not her rampant unpopularity with American women, not her own flinching from a second encounter with the Alaskan electorate.

In this regard, Continentti’s comparison of Palin to William Jennings Bryan begins to look not only apt, but ominous.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

What is called "socialist" today was not so socialist a while ago:

You could plausibly claim that the reforms on the table today are more or less what moderate Republicans were proposing under Clinton, just as the Clinton reforms were not that far removed from what Nixon himself wanted in the early 70s.

In the best sense of the word:

The world Parker actually wants is not a world in which women make babies and men chop wood. It is merely a world in which one can walk down an average city street and not be confronted by a 4-year-old in a "Future Porn Star" T-shirt, a world in which most women do not own stripper poles, a world in which most people do not know that sex-equity experts even exist. It's a world in which most people don't say "vagina" in polite conversation, vice presidents are expected to know something about the country that elected them, abortion is stigmatized but not illegal, and racial profiling is permitted but not celebrated. It is, in other words, precisely the world in which we actually live. For all her railing against our decadent times, Parker is a stalwart defender of the status quo, committed to the arbitrary prejudices of our age — recall her problem with men in jewelry — and skeptical of anyone whose ideology might challenge our present state of affairs. She is literally a conservative, which means she is nothing of a Republican.

Not these days anyway.