The Dish

Another post-9/11 horror story:

Some 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody during the past five years. The deaths are the loudest alarms about a system teetering on collapse. Actions taken — or not taken — by medical staff members may have contributed to 30 of those deaths, according to confidential internal reviews and the opinions of medical experts who reviewed some death files for The Post.

According to an analysis by The Post, most of the people who died were young. Thirty-two of the detainees were younger than 40, and only six were 70 or older. The deaths took place at dozens of sites across the country. The most at one location was six at the San Pedro compound near Los Angeles.

What has happened to America?

Still human, even in politics:

Though he’s given up journalism for politics, Johnson will always have the writer’s desire to narrate what he sees in the world around him. He has an internal monologue that can’t be shut off. Out campaigning one afternoon, a red doubledecker bus passes by. "Wave to the bus, Boris!" one of his supporters said. He waves and smiles. And then in a voice just faintly above a whisper, that only I can hear standing right next to him, he mutters, "London commuters. Doleful. Angry."

Thank God he didn’t say "bitter."

A military judge – with the backing of the military’s legal corps – acknowledges how rigged the Bush administration’s Gitmo "military tribunals" were designed to be. It’s encouraging that the decent men and women in the military are standing up to the Bush administration’s short-sighted, un-American notions of justice. Marty Lederman wonders why the NYT couldn’t provide the actual legal opinion.

This is a brilliant article, full of insight and humor, about the debate between liberal institutionalists, neocons and realists in foreign policy. And it’s all about "The Godfather", one of the greatest political movies of all time:

Tom Hagen, the liberal institutionalist: “We oughta hear what they have to say.”

Sonny, the neocon: “No, no more. Not this time, consigliere; no more meetings, no more discussions, no more Sollozzo tricks. . . . And do me a favor: no more advice on how to patch things up—just help me win alright?”

Enter Michael, the young son, the realist. McCain is still Sonny, of course. I don’t know whether Obama fits more the "liberal institutionalist" role or the realist, more Tom or Michael. I’m hoping for a Niebuhrian fusion, with the emphasis on Michael’s cunning. As I said: hoping.

My Sunday Times column is on the Clintons and race:

In the Clintons’ morphing into a crude version of racially angry Reagan Democrats, you can see an almost Shakespearian tragedy. Bill Clinton has a long and admirable record in civil rights; and was on the right side of the struggle in the South in his youth. He has an effortless rapport with black Americans, and they were his core final constituency of support in the darkest days of impeachment.

But like any southerner, Clinton also knew how to navigate racial resentment.

In 1992, he interrupted the primary campaign to return to Arkansas to sign the death warrant of a mentally retarded black man. He made a point of attacking the radical black hip hop artist Sister Souljah in his first campaign. He signed off on welfare reform. His genius was in holding together a coalition that included enough Reagan Democrats to win, while never losing wide and deep black support.

But he never ran against a black candidate and neither did his wife. They are used to loving and supporting minorities – as long as the minorities know their place and see the Clintons as the instrument of their salvation. Obama broke that dependency and that relationship. And that was why the Clintons had to do all they could to destroy and belittle and besmirch him.

But in that venture the Clintons are destroying themselves and their legacy and their capacity to bridge the very gaps they now must widen to stay in the race. It is a Clinton tragedy – and one that most Americans seem slowly, cautiously but palpably determined not to make their own.

(Photo: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty.)

A second campaign staffer turns out to be a lobbyist for the vile regime in Burma. The number of Washington loyalists among McCain’s staff is … well, more than his good government rhetoric would lead one to believe. And lobbying for these murderous, totalitarian creeps?

A new book from the always hilarious Rob Kutner of the Daily Show is just out. Here’s Rob Riggle’s promo. If you need a laugh on your way to Armageddon, it looks promising.

Another brilliant skewering from Chait.

Jake Tapper follows Bill Clinton’s divisive, anti-Obama rhetoric in West Virginia.

It’s a theme of his new Kentucky ad. But not new:

Obama has been a proponent of coal-to-liquid legislation and even co-sponsored a bill with Kentucky Republican U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning in 2007. "I am a strong believer in the free market, and I relied on my long experience in economics when I wrote the coal-to-liquid legislation that I introduced with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill," wrote Bunning in a June 11, 2007 column in the Herald-Leader. "My bill would provide incentives for the first commercial demonstrations of coal-to-liquid technology."

I thought Rove had shown that Obama had no bipartisan record in the Senate? If you still believe that, you should revisit Hilzoy’s definitive post here.