The Dish

Nashville, Tennessee, 1.08 pm.

E.J. Graff tells the liberal punditocracy to cool it on their hand-wringing over California’s court decision. I have to say there has been an irritating amount of griping. Money quote:

This year, smart Democrats should stress that: (a) California judges are elected, and thus democratically accountable; (b) the elected legislature has twice passed a marriage equality bill, which Arnold vetoed–saying the courts should decide, as they now have; and (c) the California justices, like everyone else in the California political system, knew perfectly well that voters will get the final word this fall. This is hardly a rogue decision from an unaccountable court.

I’m not a pollyanna. Yes, there will be some backlash, although I honestly think it will be far less than some imagine. Human beings just can’t stay hysterical about the same nonexistent threat forever. But could the liberal intelligentsia at least pretend, for a minute or two, to be glad that I am now a full citizen in two whole American states?

"Why is McCain allowing himself to be dragged into a debate about presidential-level diplomacy, when the more important question — and the question whose answer is more politically favorable to McCain — is whether diplomatic engagement will actually get anything accomplished? McCain should be asking Obama what concessions he realistically thinks he’s going to get from the Iranians upon going hat in hand to Tehran. UN Security Council sanctions have done virtually nothing to impede Iran, nor have EU diplomacy or IAEA reports. Russia and China continue to stand as the major impediments to the kind of UN sanctions that might so cripple Iran that it would give up its nuclear development. The hard question for Obama, who says he wishes to pursue “tough diplomacy,” is how he proposes to get these two stalwarts on board. The question of whether the President should go calling on Assad and Ahmadinejad is an important one, and it says a lot about a person’s understanding of foreign policy and the Middle East. But ultimately it is a diversion that does no favors for McCain," – Noah Pollak, Contentions.

Publius on Kentucky Democrats:

One thing to keep in mind is that many of Kentucky’s “Democrats” are Republicans for all practical purposes. Interestingly, registered Democrats still far outnumber Republicans 57%-36% (that’s as of 2006, though Republicans are gaining). But despite the party registration totals, Bush won the state handily 60%-40%…

Ideologically, many of these people are simply Republicans — but they still got to vote today. Sure, they sometimes vote for a Democrat on the state or local level (just like Massachusetts elects Republican governors). But they consider themselves conservative — and no Democratic candidate who could win the median Democratic voter nationally would be acceptable.

A reader writes:

But again, no Democrat has done or could have done as much damage to spending restraint than the current president and Republican party and McCain is running as Bush’s heir, wheter he lieks it or not. The current Republicans, moreover, made this kind of spending legitimate – and they voted en masse in favor it as well. I suspect McCain would be a marginally better president on spending than Obama – he voted against the Medicare prescription benefit, after all. But he won’t tackle entitlements or defense – and they are the only real items that make a significant difference. And his insistence on no tax hikes also means he would leave a bigger debt than Obama would. That’s the choice. It’s not an easy one fiscally.

Marc:

As the primary goes on, the opportunities for Clinton backers to feel slighted is magnified — hence Geraldine Ferraro’s opinion still mattering. Well, Clinton sees herself as the representative for the party’s white working class voters and women and wants to do their interests justice. She has concluded that, the longer she stays in (until June 4), the more options she has.

Though she has banned her staff from speculating about the vice presidency, people close to her — people who know her — believe that she would want to be asked to serve and would want to serve, if the situation presented itself. Does Clinton believe that she’s going to force Obama’s negatives up so high that he loses the election in November and Clinton comes back in 2012? No — if that was her intention, she’d have gotten out when the getting out was good — when Rev. Wright was hurting Obama and Obama needed a victory, like North Carolina, to regain some footing. (The depth of worry in the Obama campaign during the Rev. Wright affair can not be overestimated — they were very afraid.) The Obama campaign is much less dismissive of Clinton than they were two weeks ago. That’s in part because Clinton is no longer a threat to them. They’re taking cues from their boss — John Edwards’s endorsement was really the first time in a few months that Obama himself could allow himself a real smile, and a real sense of accomplishment, and a real sense that the competition was over.

Derb discusses evolution and creationism:

It cannot be denied…that Darwinism’s metaphysical implications are hard to square with any view of human nature not flatly biological; and this applies as much to the “blank slate” egalitarianism of the irreligious Left as to the soul-based universalism of the religious Right. This is inevitable. As an empirical view of living matter, chasing down its truths one by one through thickets of patient observation, Darwinism is bound to offend systems derived from introspection, revelation, or social approval.

Which is why, of course, Darwin was, in some respects, a conservative in the classical sense. Once you grasp that, as Derb has, you realize how far contemporary American right has strayed from conservatism’s skeptical, empirical roots.

(Hat tip: Frank Wilson. Photo: A path in the grounds of Down House that Darwin regularly walked along and called his "Thinking Path".)

Here’s Fresh Air’s interview with Jim Webb. He’s on a roll right now.

Jeffrey Toobin attacks McCain over possible Supreme Court appointments. I’m not sure why one should be surprised that McCain would likely appoint conservative justices. Here are the last two paragraphs:

Might [McCain] really be a “maverick” when it comes to the Supreme Court? The answer, almost certainly, is no. The Senator has long touted his opposition to Roe, and has voted for every one of Bush’s judicial appointments; the rhetoric of his speech shows that he is getting his advice on the Court from the most extreme elements of the conservative movement.

With the general election in mind, McCain had to express himself with such elaborate circumlocution because he knows that the constituency for such far-reaching change in our constellation of rights is small, and may be shrinking. In 2004, to stoke turnout among conservatives, Karl Rove engineered the addition of anti-gay-marriage voter initiatives to the ballots in Ohio and other states; last week, though, when the California Supreme Court voted to allow gay marriage in that state, only hard-core activists were able to muster much outrage. When it comes to the Constitution, McCain is on the wrong side of the voters, and of history; thus, his obfuscations.

Still, the Bush-McCain agenda for the courts has made great strides. Bush’s conservative appointees to the Supreme Court—John G. Roberts, Jr., and Samuel A. Alito, Jr.—have joined Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in a phalanx that is more radical than any that the Court has seen since F.D.R.’s appointments. Those Justices allowed the New Deal to proceed, and set the stage for the noblest era in the Court’s history, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, when the civil and individual rights of all citizens finally received their constitutional due. By contrast, in just three years the Roberts Court has crippled school-desegregation efforts (and hinted that affirmative action may be next); approved a federal law that bans a form of abortion; limited the reach of job-discrimination laws; and made it more difficult to challenge the mixing of church and state. It’s difficult to quarrel with Justice Stephen Breyer’s assessment of his new colleagues: “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” And more change is likely to come. John Paul Stevens, the leader of the Court’s four embattled liberals, just celebrated his eighty-eighth birthday; Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seventy-five; David Souter is only sixty-eight but longs for his home in New Hampshire. For all the elisions in John McCain’s speech, one unmistakable truth emerged: that the stakes in the election, for the Supreme Court and all who live by its rulings, are very, very high.

I’m used to being staggered by the disgusting indecency of th Bush administration’s embrace of torture. But whenever one feels that you cannot be shocked any more, we discover another atrocity. Here’s what we are now being told by the FBI:

According to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, an FBI agent reported a detainee belonging to China’s ethnic Uighur minority and a Uighur translator told him Uighur detainees were kept awake for long periods, deprived of food and forced to endure cold for hours on end, just prior to questioning by Chinese interrogators.

Susan Manning, a lawyer who represents several Uighurs still held at Guantanamo, said Tuesday the allegations are all too familiar.

U.S. personnel "are engaging in abusive tactics on behalf of the Chinese," she said Tuesday. When Uighur detainees refused to talk to Chinese interrogators in 2002, U.S. military personnel put them in solitary confinement as punishment, she said.

The sleep deprivation, food manipulation, and hypothermia are classic Gestapo methods for torturing prisoners. And the United States now does these unspeakable acts at the behest of the Communist regime in China.