The Dish

A major McCain supporter, Rod Parsley, has opined that the United States was founded to destroy Islam. Regardless of the damage this does to an effective war against Islamism, he is empirically wrong. From The Conservative Soul:

In 1797, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved the "Treaty of Tripoli," an attempt to deal with Muslim piracy and terrorism in the Mediterranean. One of its clauses read:

"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

It is hard to think of a leading contemporary Republican insisting that American government "is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." In the early republic, not a single senator dissented.

Man, they’re good. A reader writes:

I have to say, as an upper-middle class liberal who has been known to enjoy the occasional latte or, even worse, cafe au lait, I’m a little sick of the abuse.  No, I don’t watch NASCAR.  No, I am not a soccer mom/dad.  I just like my damn coffee with milk in it.  Is that so wrong?  Yes, my morning is made a little brighter by having some nice barista at the local coffee shop make that coffee for me.  I’m sorry that this makes me hate America.  But if you think I’m out of touch now, just try me WITHOUT my coffee.

Another:

I don’t know if it makes you an elite snooty pansy-ass un-American commie terrorist-lover, but three vanilla petite scones?  Totally gay.

Not that there’s anything wrong that. And another:

I was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, and I live in Cleveland, Ohio. Most of my family is blue collar, my dad was the president of his local union.

Every time I go to Starbucks, I’ve had my eye on those damn petite vanilla scones.  Please, how were they?  My elite snooty pansy-ass Obama-lovin’ side of me wants to know.  The blue collar roots in me noticed there was a price break on three.

They’re totally awesome: moist, sweet, crusty, the best pastry Starbucks has come up with. And I include the toffee almond bar.

If you do not know of Cuban Yoani Sanchez’s blog, Generacion Y, you should. The Castros loathe her of course and have prevented her from traveling abroad. And still she blogs. Her latest (translated from the Spanish):

On top of everything, yesterday I got a new award. This one has the title of a Saturday night movie: “The Captive Blogger” and it consists of not letting me travel to Madrid for the Ortega & Gasset Awards Ceremony. Those who honored me with the Captive Blogger prize refuse to provide their names and surnames, although we have referred to them in this blog as “them”. Those are the ones who, with a military uniform, administer our rights as citizens and do not grant explanations, but deliver orders.

I never thought I deserved so many attentions, but if the officers insist, ok, I accept this new distinction. They forget that in cyberspace my voice can travel with no limits, come and go without asking for permission… It does not matter they have retained my passport. I have another one that, in the nationality section, bears one brief word: “blogger”.

The best passport there is.

Judah Grunstein’s two cents on Obama’s emphasis on soft power:

The danger of Obama’s overly ambitious and unrealistic rhetoric, like all overly ambitious and unrealistic rhetoric, is in raising expectations, both domestically and abroad, about the transformative capacity of American power, at a time when a smart foreign policy would attempt to downsize those expectations. And as Hampton implied, increased expectations tend to lead to hubris and mission creep. The fact that there’s a collective longing for the kind of shift to soft power that Obama emphasizes, both domestically and abroad, only makes the temptation to overestimate its capacities even greater.

A reader writes:

Hillary’s hanging on to the contest dramatically proves to me that she is unfit to be our president. It is so Bush-like, is it not? It’s her Iraq. She has obviously failed, yet she keeps on just to prove she’s not a quitter. Where have we heard that lately? How can we depend on her? Like Bush, she cannot admit a mistake. She can’t admit failure. She is not rational. She’ll take us down with her.

We need a rational president so badly. One who makes decisions based on careful consideration of all the facts and understands the real risks and likelihood of success. Hillary is running her campaign into the ground financially. Is that what we want in a president? Someone who uses fear and divisiveness to appeal to people?

Her campaign alone is a reason to vote against her.

A reader writes:

In discussing McCain’s relationship with Rod Parsley, you wrote:

Of course, a twenty-year relationship with a preacher counts for more than a public political endorsement and embrace of a religious nut-job.

I suppose this now qualifies as the conventional wisdom, but from where I’m sitting, it seems exactly backwards.  I speak from some experience. I am a minister (in the United Church of Christ, no less) and I can tell you that my politics have very little to do with my pastoral relationships.  The Republican elected officials who sit in the pews of my church know that I am a lefty; they don’t particularly care because they don’t come to me for political advice, any more than I would hit up my accountant for tips on lowering my cholesterol. There is more to life than politics – even (especially?) in the relationship between a politician and her pastor.

Senator Obama had a pastoral relationship with Jeremiah Wright; Senator McCain has a political relationship with Rod Parsley –the only thing bringing them together is a shared political agenda.  That, I think, should make Rod Parsley’s odious political rantings far more relevant to the presidential campaign than those of Jeremiah Wright.

But what do I know?

I’ll probably regret this, it breaks Godwin’s law, and there are lots of very naughty words, but it made me laugh:

A snippet from Karen Tumulty’s article:

As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state’s 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all.

Penn denies it.

Siri Carpenter reports on subconscious bias.

Matt makes an obvious point about the imbalance between the Wright-Obama conflation and the Parsley-Hagee-McCain nexus:

A certain number of clueless liberals are going to wonder why this isn’t nearly as big a deal as Reverend Wright, so in case you don’t get it the difference is that anti-Muslim bigotry is a fairly mainstream and popular sentiment in the United States so associating with the Daniel Pipes’ and Rod Parsley’s of the world is only a problem in the actual, substantive sense of indicating that McCain’s foreign policy views are bad and dangerous, not in the freak show "this’ll hurt in November in Pennsylvania" sense.

The same goes for the anti-gay stuff. Beating up on minorities is always less politically toxic than beating up on majorities. In democracies, anyway. Atwater, Morris and Rove just did the math.