The Dish

A reader writes:

You wrote this afternoon, “[Palin's] being turned into a kind of Marian figure, a blessed icon whose mere touch bestows some kind of aura on a candidate or race.” Not a Marian figure, I suggest.

The Wasilla warrior is more like a Maid of Orléans sort of figure. Sarah Palin has become a latter-day Joan of Arc to the populist or “Jacksonian” elements of rural, red-state America.

Rémi Gaillard is the Sacha Baron Cohen of France. His latest video is a good way to end a stint of bat–blogging on the Dish:

… they're not crazy. They still think he's doing a better job than George W. Bush.

Joe Scarborough looks on the bright side of today's Beck-Palin insurgency:

Hoffman's ascendancy in NY-23 is less about Barack Obama than it is about a decade of bloated and corrupt Republican leadership in Washington, D.C. This race gave the same conservatives who helped drive Ronald Reagan's victory and the 1994 Republican Revolution something to cheer about for the first time in a long time. It also gave them an opportunity to stick it to an incompetent GOP Establishment.

This was, after all, same political party that promised to balance budgets in the 1990s, but then turned around and produced record deficits a over the next ten years.

And those same Republican leaders who called for military restraint and a focused foreign policy while Bill Clinton was president then spent the next decade promising to rid the world of tyranny by exporting Democracy across the globe.

Man, I hope he's right.

But when you examine the actual positions of this movement, you find a re-dedication to certain Bush themes: there is no open skepticism of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Kristol Palin is arguing for a massive increase in troops. There is an absolute prohibition on raising any taxes. There are no proposed spending cuts to bring fiscal sanity back from the Bush-Cheney ditch. There is denial of human-driven climate change. There is religious hostility to gay couples. There is increasing insistence on no legal abortion including rape and incest.

I'm glad there is finally a protest against Bush-Cheney. Some of us protested when it could have made a difference. But if it is just a protest, if it has no content, if it continues to placate the Christianist right, if it refuses to tackle neoconservatism in foreign policy, if it fails to offer specifics on spending cuts, then it is hard to take seriously. And, in fact, it is important not to take it seriously.

The fears of Protect Marriage Washington seem to have some bearing:

Steve Coll's read on the situation in Afghanistan:

[Abdullah] has long sought constitutional reforms to strengthen parliament over the presidency. He is almost certainly interested in rejoining the government, with some of his allies, if the deal is attractive enough. He retains ambitions and wishes to remain a viable national figure in a post-Karzai Afghanistan. He will be in a stronger position to negotiate toward all of these goals by adopting the posture he announced yesterday than he would have been if he had participated in the runoff and been defeated. Rather than a confirmed election loser, Abdullah now presents himself to the international community and the Karzai government as a problem to be solved—a responsible, reasonable problem, open to constructive negotiations that will address his interests and concerns.

The same slog in the state Senate remains:

Privately, Sampson has told Republicans he has 25 or 26 votes (out of 32 Democrats), leaving him six or seven GOP votes short of passage. Sources say Republicans could deliver perhaps three or four, but only if Sampson guarantees at least 29 or 30 on his end. "If vulnerable Democrats are allowed off this vote, it's likely that Republicans will consider this a political issue rather than a vote of conscience. And then all bets are off," says a Republican source.

Daphne Eviatar sets the scene:

The American Civil Liberties Union has just released a video of interviews with five former Guantanamo detainees, talking about their experiences of abuse in U.S. custody. It’s not easy to watch, but it’s certainly worthwhile. […T]he fact that all the men were eventually released without charge suggests, at least, that the Bush administration’s claim that they were among “the worst of the worst” didn’t turn out to be true. The video also gives a strong sense of how and why the Guantanamo detention center, and the treatment of the men imprisoned there, ended up being a powerful recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.

Matt Steinglass says goyim or non-Israeli Jews can't discuss Israel with real honesty:

If we’re talking about American Jewish debates here, then the reason Gideon Levy and other Israelis can go farther in their critiques is the same reason why African-Americans can have a much more full-throated and vicious debate within the community about various kinds of problems than white commentators can have about those problems. Basically, you do your army service and serve your miluim, and it entitles you to say a whole lot of stuff that people sitting in nice coffee bars in Manhattan can’t say.

Screw that. This is the blogosphere. The point is not who says what, but what they're saying. Does it make sense or not? Does it add up or not? Can it survive scrutiny?

Against most expectations, turnout is around 50 percent so far, especially in some urban areas, like Bangor. A working assumption is that the higher the turnout the better the prospects for civil rights. I don't know if that's true or not. But if you haven't voted yet in Maine, please help protect the civil equality that gay couples have won from the legislature.