The Dish

In his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, Karl Rove remembers something that was done to John McCain in Vietnam:

Another McCain story, somewhat better known, is about the Vietnamese practice of torturing him by tying his head between his ankles with his arms behind him, and then leaving him for hours. The torture so badly busted up his shoulders that to this day Mr. McCain can’t raise his arms over his head. One night, a Vietnamese guard loosened his bonds, returning at the end of his watch to tighten them again so no one would notice.

This is what is called a "stress position." It was authorized, monitored and practised as a torture technique by this president, whose chief adviser at the time was Karl Rove. Rove even planned to run the 2006 Congressional campaign on the message of being tough enough on prisoners in American custody.

In the same op-ed, Rove refers warmly to McCain’s Bangladeshi adopted daughter – the same daughter his surrogates demonized in the 2000 campaign, by spreading rumors that McCain had a black illegitimate daughter.

Every now and again, one is shocked by the Big Lies and chutzpah that come out of a man as utterly indifferent to the truth as Rove. And then one realizes: this is what these people do for a living. They say anything to retain and wield power.

Wolfowitz concedes that it never occurred to anyone in the Bush administration that Saddam’s loyalists could mount an insurgency against the invasion. In his own words, the Bushies were "clueless." Well: at least he’s honest.

"It’s one of the mysteries of the blogosphere, why more people don’t simply pick up the phone once in a while," – Jeffrey Goldberg, acclimatizing fast. I’m trying to help:

I was telling Andrew about an on-line mugging I experienced at the hands of a person named Matt Haber, who is associated with the New York Observer, about which I have generally warm feelings, in part because it gave my book a great review, and we all know what such a review does for a person’s self-esteem, if not for a book’s actual sales. Andrew wasn’t impressed by my complaint. "Calling you an asshole is just the blogosphere’s way of saying hello," he said.

Clinton puts out a contrast ad on her non-sensible solutions to rising gas prices and the mortgage crisis:

I’m with Tom Friedman on this. One way to judge a politician is to see how reluctant they are to use the baldest forms of pandering and bribery to win votes. Even when they know the policy in question is stupid and counter-productive, their short-term political interest always takes precedence over sound policy. For me, this gas tax holiday crap is an almost pure example of this. And McCain and Clinton have both signed on to it. If you want to know about political character, this tells you a lot.

Well, we know what’s going to be on The Soup this Friday. But Jason seemed more out of it to me.

Is the lack of support a function of many Catholics’ distance from African-Americans? Or is it Obama’s problem, as Deal Hudson counters? Deal says abortion is the issue, but against Clinton? On this, I feel as distant from my fellow Catholics as I do from my fellow gays. It may be that I have long been fascinated by black Catholics in America, their remarkable journey, and have attended a black Catholic church in Washington. Obama’s reasoned faith seems to me very compatible with a Catholic sensibility. So I lean with the racial and cultural divide as an explanation.

What Danny and Dick said.

The state’s Democrats, having voted for Clinton in the primary, now strongly favor Obama in a poll:

A new Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey poll shows Barack Obama is more popular than Hillary Clinton in New Jersey, even though Clinton beat Obama by ten percentage points in the state’s February 5 Democratic primary. Obama has a 58%-27% favorable rating, while Clinton is at 46%-43%. And by a 45%-38% margin, more New Jersey and Democrat-leaning independents say that would rather see Obama capture the Democratic presidential nomination.

The truth about Clinton remains: massive negatives, little appeal to Independents, and several looming scandals involving Bill.

Dan Savage goes after the Human Rights Campaign for not backing an openly gay candidate. Like anyone should be surprised. And here’s their response to Senator Clinton’s laughing at the North Carolina governor’s use of the word "pansy":

"We certainly wish the governor would have chosen his words better and have expressed our disappointment to his staff."

I wonder if HRC ran this by the staff at the Hillary Rodham Clinton camp first? Or would that have been superfluous? By the way, pace the pro-Clinton gay press, I’m not the only one worried that the Clintons have pitched this campaign in ways that suggest they would do in their third term what they did in their first two: use gays as a punching bag to credentialize themselves with the O’Reilly right.

A Nike ad by Guy Ritchie: pure British testosterone: