The Dish

By a six-year-old boy in a box.

Today on the Dish we observed a range of news on bigotry. The good: Jennifer Vanasco and George Takei gave us a glimpse at the end of gay culture. The bad: Republicans smeared some Muslim interns and a gay official. The ugly: moral degenerates lashed out against gays in Queens and Iran.

Andrew mused over a fascinating take on American exceptionalism from James McManus. Robert Drape revealed the fascinating tale of Obama's race speech. A gay ex-soldier came out of the Camo Closet, while an ex-marine shared some shrewd wisdom.

Readers spelled out the conservatism of "cut-and-run" here and here. Steven Metz shot down the idea of a "civilian surge" while Judah Grunstein took a shot at the media covering Af-Pak. We also got a letter from Tehran.

Sarah Palin got her read on. 

— C.B.

As George Will talks of a GOP wave in 2010:

A reader writes:

I disagree completely with the 82nd Airborne vet. I served a four-year enlistment in the Marine Corps and I did live in crowded barracks, floated for six months on an even more crowded ship, and served a combat tour in the field. And, as I think back to that time, I can honestly say that no Marine in any command I ever served in would have been “fragged” for being openly gay. It is beyond my imagination that anyone would have tolerated that. (By the way, fragging, if it even occurs anymore, would be far more likely a reaction to poor leadership than sexual orientation.)

What I can imagine are some awkward moments, maybe some not-so-good-natured teasing, hazing, even a fight or two. But that's a large part of what goes on in many hyper-masculine environments anyway. (Hell, that's what goes on in some college dormitories.) At the end of the day it was about earning and maintaining the trust of your platoon. Unit cohesion was almost singularly about whether you could pull your weight and be counted on to share the suffering than who you were hooking up with.

I think you are dead-on that vast majority of soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen will not come out in the barracks (or wherever they serve). Those that do would likely do so quietly to trusted peers. Most would continue to keep their private lives to themselves. Which is what most successful Marines did, gay and straight.

Now, none of this is to say that a gay activist, someone who really wants to let that freak flag fly, would be tolerated very long. But it wouldn't be because they are gay– rather, the military isn't tolerant of activists in general. By it’s fundamental nature the military is a unique setting and by joining you give up some aspects of individuality and, yes, even some rights – after all, the whole is more important than it's parts.

There is a behavioral box, and you are expected to operate within that box. And that means you keep your drinking under control, you keep your spouse from interfering with your job, you downplay your politics and religion, you keep your personal business from affecting your work. If you choose to act out you will run up against a wall. That wall might be from your command or it might be from your peers, but there will be resistance to activism.

I would argue that it might actually be easier for the military to make this transition than it was to integrate blacks or move women into combat environments – because gays would have the option of deciding for themselves who knew what their sexual preference was. Racists knew who they hated and there was no hiding if you were black. Misogynists, probably a larger problem in the military anyway, made little effort to hide their feelings towards women.

I believe this will be a non-event once it happens. And it needs to happen. And happen sooner than later.

Andrew Briggs sighs as well:

Wisely, the Obama administration stuck to a theme of helping those in need and stimulating the economy rather than trying to make a substantive inflation-based case for the payment. (That said, seniors are hardly the most in need in the current recession and it's not clear how well these payments work as stimulus. I didn't say it was a good argument, just better than the alternative.)

[…]The Obama policy is less bad than the Republican alternatives from Reps. Walter Jones (NC) and Rodney Alexander (LA). These would have given all beneficiaries a 3 percent increase (2.9 percent in Alexander's proposal; got to be fiscally responsible these days…) but then build future COLAs on top so that benefits would always be 3 percent higher. My guestimate is that these plans could cost close to $200 billion over the long run, so I guess we dodge a bullet on that one.

So, once again, the GOP is more fiscally irresponsible than Obama.

That was always the argument against inter-racial marriage (sound familiar?) and apparently, in some minds, it still is.

A pastor writes:

Too bad the guy with the passage from Leviticus tattooed on his arm didn’t read the next chapter:

“You shall not make any gashes in your flesh for the dead or tattoo any marks upon you; I am the LORD”

Or in the King James Version:

“Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD.”

Of course since when is the Bible applied to oneself. It is apparently only to be applied to others, as an excuse for abuse.

Ben Smith passes along an e-mail from Kevin Nix, a spokesman for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network:

There were indications of seriousness of purpose on DADT repeal today by this White House with its intent to nominate an Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. [Retired Marine General Clifford Stanley] is likely to be the President’s key Pentagon player in the DADT debate and will be critical for the President in getting military uniform buy-in. Historically, the position of Under Secretary of Defense provides oversight of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Robert Draper offers some fascinating new detail:

[L]ast March 13, when the incendiary sermons of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, blew up all over the cable networks, Obama had spent the entire day and evening in the Senate. That Friday, after enduring a series of tough interviews, Obama informed Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe, “I want to do a speech on race.” And he added, “I want to make this speech no later than next Tuesday. I don’t think it can wait.” Axelrod and Plouffe tried to talk him into delaying it: He had a full day of campaigning on Saturday, a film shoot on Sunday, and then another hectic day campaigning in Pennsylvania on Monday. Obama was insistent. On the Saturday-morning campaign conference call, Favreau was told to get to work on a draft immediately. Favreau replied, “I’m not writing this until I talk to him.” That

evening, Saint Patrick’s Day, less than seventy-two hours before the speech would be delivered to a live audience, Favreau was sitting alone in an unfurnished group house in Chicago when the boss called. “I’m going to give you some stream of consciousness,” Obama told him. Then he spoke for about forty-five minutes, laying out his speech’s argumentative construction. Favreau thanked him, hung up, considered the enormity of the task and the looming deadline, and then decided he was “too freaked out by the whole thing” to write and went out with friends instead.

On Sunday morning at seven, the speechwriter took his laptop to a coffee shop and worked there for thirteen hours. Obama received Favreau’s draft at eight that evening and wrote until three in the morning. He hadn’t finished by Monday at 8 a.m., when he set the draft aside to spend the day barnstorming across Pennsylvania. At nine thirty that night, a little more than twelve hours before the speech was to be delivered, Obama returned to his hotel room to do more writing. At two in the morning, the various BlackBerrys of Axelrod, Favreau, Plouffe, and Jarrett sounded with a message from the candidate: Here it is. Favs, feel free to tweak the words. Everyone else, the content here is what I want to say. Axelrod stood in the dark reading the text: “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made.… But what we know—what we have seen—is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope—the audacity to hope—for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

He e-mailed Obama: This is why you should be president.

Could this be a clue to where his thinking remains:

We are going through a very deliberate process that is completely consistent with what I said back in March. At the time, I said we were going to deploy additional troops in order to secure the election. After the election I said it was important for us to reassess the situation on the ground, and that's what we're doing not just on the military side but also on the civilian side … And I won't provide you a preview of what I've been seeing or hearing. I will tell you that our principal goal remains to root out al Qaeda and its extremist allies that can launch attacks against the United States or its allies. That's our principal mission. We are also obviously interested in stability in the region, and that includes not only Afghanistan, but also Pakistan.

That's from his remarks October 13 with Zapatero. It doesn't sound like a major counter-insurgency to me.