The Dish

Juan Cole responds to a Dish reader.

[Re-posted from Sunday.]

Here's a funny and moving obit about the most characterful – and food obsessed – dogs I know:

Rosie, who died yesterday at 13, was the World’s Most Food-Motivated Dog. She won the title with a stunt modern science has yet to explain. One evening about five years ago, I returned home from a day-trip to Sydney with a notion to make a sardine sandwich for supper. I had left an unopened tin of sardines on the kitchen table before leaving for town. At least, I thought I had, but now I couldn’t find it.

Losing things is nothing new for this blogger and finding them is not his long suit. I spent a few minutes searching for the sardines, then made something else for supper.

While putting Rosie to bed later that night, I spotted the sardine can stashed among the blankets at the back of her sleeping crate. She had chewed the top off, and extracted every morsel of fish and every drop of sardine oil. The can didn’t even smell of sardines anymore.

In horror, I rushed to inspect Rosie’s mouth, expecting to find her lips and tongue shredded. Not a nick. Rosie was fit as a fiddle, and wondering when her next meal would arrive.

“Golden slumber close your eyes.” And sate your tummy.

Dusty, our eldest, is almost the same. When I got her as a tiny puppy twelve and a half years' ago, the vet told me not to worry about keeping her food intake down. I was told: puppies need lots of food, and you could even just let her eat out of the bag; she'll take what she wants and grow. This was probably the craziest advice anyone has ever given me. Barely a few inches long at the time and a few pounds, she  plowed into the bag with manic determination until she all but disappeared. I left for a few moments and returned to find that she had puked a couple of times already, eaten the puke, and started over with the food. I learned my lesson. She has been the same ever since.

Then there was the time when two friends came to visit, a gay couple one of whom had planned to propose to his boyfriend on the steps of the Supreme Court (yes, a drama queen if ever there was one) while he was visiting. They came by first and dropped their bag off and we went out to dinner. No one told me that in the bag were two large boxes of Godiva chocolates. They left the bag on the floor.

I came back early (can't remember why now). When I walked in the entire loft was an explosion of wrappers, ribbons, little bits of silver foil, ripped shards of boxes, in every corner of the room. In the middle of it, lay Dusty, bloated to almost twice her size, with a grin of ecstatic pleasure and satisfaction and chocolate smeared all over her face. After the shock, my immediate thought was panic. Chocolate can be poisonous for dogs and she'd eaten two boxes of the richest chocolate there is. I immediately tried to get her to vomit (if it ever happens to you, get a tea-spoon of salt and pour it down their throat). No luck. She seemed to need water, so I gave it to her and she just drank and drank until she looked like she'd burst. I rushed her outside and waited for the puke. No luck. I took her in to phone the animal hospital. And then it started.

It was a beagle Linda Blair – with viscous chocolate liquid projectile vomiting everywhere in sight. I went to grab her to get her outside. She decided this was a game. So yours truly spent the next ten minutes chasing a projectile chocolate vomiting beagle around my loft until every single item of furniture, every rug, and the bed was covered in what felt and looked like chocolate mucus. My low point was actually slipping in some and careening headfirst into a pile of still-warm, and very slippery chocolate goo. That's when my guests returned, to find their secret busted. But all they could do was laugh at me until they near-collapsed.

Dusty's twelve and a half now. Last week, as I prepared to leave Ptown, I took her out for a walk on the beach. There's a rock that juts into the water halfway down the beach – and since she was a baby, she has always loved to climb it and just sit there looking at the bay for a moment. She's done it many times every year since and if we are walking past that rock, she pulls me so she can clamber up. In the last year, her back knee has given out and the vet has said it would be far too difficult and counter-productive to have an operation that probably wouldn't work anyway. So she's on an anti-inflammatory and some baby aspirin and seems irritated by it but not in any real pain. But she now limps a little, and this time, even with her bad knee, she dragged me to the rock like a steam engine. She couldn't clamber up, so I lifted her.

She looked out at the sea and the sky as the wind made her beagle ears into little sails, flying back past her head. Dusty smiles all the time. 

But this time, tears came into my eyes. I had the unmistakable feeling that she knew this could be the last time, and she was taking it all in. The last time I had this feeling was 14 years ago on a beach with my dear friend Patrick, who died a week later. Dusty is a fighter and a character and she may well be around for a few years yet. But she loves that place as much as I do, and she's been there every summer since she was born. 

I used to think that dogs were just dogs, beneath us humans, different in fundamental ways. I don't any more. I see the trace of God's love and God's creation in every one. But I only really see it in the one I love and have lived in the same room with for twelve years and counting.

Evgeny Morozo argues that the internet will not lead to greater democratization. In June the Dish proved that the internet can document an uprising in a way no technology has before, but Morozo’s viewpoint is still worth airing. It’s twelve minutes long but engaging throughout:

(Hat tip: Sager)

Ezra Klein explains:

The Wyden folks quietly slipped in an amendment giving states enormous flexibility to experiment upward. Essentially, states can ask the federal government for a waiver that allows them to keep the federal funds they're receiving and do pretty much anything they want with them, so long as the coverage they provide is "at least as comprehensive as required under the Chairman’s Mark" and will "lower health care spending growth, improve the delivery system performance, provide affordable choices for all its citizens, expand protections against excessive out-of-pocket spending, provides coverage to the same number of uninsured and not increase the Federal deficit."

That could be used for a public option. But it could also be used for single-payer. The potential problem, as Jon Cohn points out, is that a Republican statehouse could use it to ratchet back coverage in existing public programs. But since the amendment doesn't allow anything to drift beneath the levels envisioned in the bill itself, it's hard to imagine a conservative state using it to be any less generous than the state would otherwise be.

Tom Ricks on what he learned yesterday:

General McChrystal is asking some people to commit to joining him in Afghanistan for three to five years, which tells me that we don't yet understand what a remarkably different approach he intends to take there.

DiA makes a good point:

Probably the signal difference between this year's GOP and 1994's version of the party can be summed up in three words: Contract with America. The Contract, at the time, drove Democrats insane. They thought it represented a return to Reagan-era governing formulas that were proven failures. But while some of the Contract's planks were pernicious (the balanced-budget amendment) and others were irrelevant (the black-helicopter crowd's "National Security Restoration Act", which forbade the president from placing American troops under UN command, or from mind-melding with extraterrestrials), the document did represent a coherent blueprint for what Republicans promised to do if they were given power.

Republicans couldn't actually keep much of their contract when they took power in 1995; some died in the Senate, some was vetoed by Bill Clinton. Nancy Pelosi found herself with similar problems keeping her legislative promises in 2007. But the GOP today isn't even trying to outline a programme of governance.

From Calculated Risk. Donald Marron explains the significance of the dotted line:

[T]he Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the number of jobs in March 2009 was 824,000 lower than it previously thought. But BLS won’t include this adjustment in its official data until early February. The official, as-yet-unadjusted data indicate that 7.2 million jobs have been lost since the recession started in December 2007. The future revision to March figures, however, implies that a better estimate would be 8 million.

Joe Klein reacts to the Telegraph scoop:

Well, that may explain a few things. A certain amount of overcompensation, for starters. I mean, in the annals of self-hating Jewry, this really makes David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel–so accused by Bibi Netanyahu–look like pikers. In any case, we await  Ahmadi-Nejad's verdict on all this.  Perhaps he'll revise his views about the Holocaust (though I doubt it). But if things get too embarrassing for him in Iran, he now has a backup plan–since his mother was, presumably Jewish too, there's a place for him in the country he calls the Zionist Entity. Shalom, Mahmoud!

Juan Cole shrugs:

The revelation in Iran doesn't change anything; Ahmadinejad does not make his critiques of Israel with reference to his own heritage but on the basis of a radical interpretation of Khomeinist ideology. The latter in its full form is only a little over 40 years old, so for everyone in Ahmadinejad's age cohort, it is an adopted ideology for those who adhere to it, not an inherited one.

Not an Onion headline.

I finally managed to write the column. It tries to sum up the somewhat scattered thoughts and arguments on the Dish as best I can:

Here are some of the factors we do not fully understand right now. Pakistan’s military is on the verge of a large offensive against the Taliban. We don’t know what the outcome of that will be. The election in Afghanistan is unresolved, with serious and credible allegations of fraud and the possibility of a run-off or any number of unforeseen developments. Again, we do not know the outcome of that. Iraq, still home to almost 130,000 US troops, is far from stable and could descend into sectarian anarchy when the US leaves. There are some encouraging signs there — especially Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s inclusion of Sunni groups in his new coalition and an apparent resurgence of national unity as a theme in the current campaign. If Iraqis are finally ready to leave the past behind, if the bloody chaos of the worst years has shifted that national psyche, that would indeed be miraculous. Bloody civil wars can do that (it was true of the English civil war and the 30 years’ war): they can finally persuade a population that compromise really is better than the alternative. Once the general population believes that, and there is a halfway credible national government willing to support them, a pivot can occur. We may not be there in Iraq, but it would be insane, after the immense sacrifice and carnage of the past few years, to dismiss the possibility that disaster could be avoided. Of course, anyone boldly predicting triumph in Iraq needs his head examined.

The truth is: we do not know the outcome of that either, and since the US has limited resources, and has already pummelled the troops beyond what most mortals could tolerate, Obama should be cautious about overextension in very volatile regions. Shifting a large number of troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan is a risk to Iraq and potentially a disastrous strategic call.

So what to do? In a moment of immense unpredictability and fluidity, it seems that muddling through for a while may be an unsatisfying but sensible option. Marc Lynch, as shrewd a foreign policy analyst as exists in Washington, put the case very well last week:

“Why choose between escalation or withdrawal at exactly the time when the political picture is at its least clear? Why not maintain a lousy Afghan government which doesn’t quite fall, keep the Taliban on the ropes without defeating it, cut deals where we can and try to figure out a strategy to deal with the Pakistan part, which all the smart set agrees is the real issue these days? Why not focus on applying the improved counterinsurgency tactics with available resources right now instead of focusing on more troops? If the American core objective in Afghanistan is to prevent its re-emergence as an Al-Qaeda safe haven, or to prevent the Taliban from taking Kabul, those seem to be manageable at lower troop levels.”

In other words, meticulously prepare for either the McChrystal counterinsurgency surge or a more low-key counterterrorism campaign. But right now, hold on to see what emerges after the results of the imminent Pakistani military campaign in Waziristan and after we know more about the post-election position in Afghanistan.

The full column is here.