The Dish

"Make no mistake, there are people in the United States who despise America… hate America… and hate our way of life. Barack Hussein Obama is THEIR CANDIDATE and they will do everything in their power to make sure that patriotic Americans do not understand exactly how dangerous Barack Hussein Obama really is. They’ll hide his record and his past and they’ll tar-and-feather his opposition," – Floyd Brown, creator of the Willie Horton ads, asking fro money from the Hewitt-Newsmax-WND right.

Noah Shachtman’s reaction to Petraeus’s nomination to commander of U.S. Central Command:

One camp in the military wants the armed forces to focus more and more on combatting insurgencies and other non-traditional wars, like the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The other crowd is worried about the Army becoming losing its big war skills.  The counterinsurgents won today.  And not just in the elevation of Petraeus, who oversaw the writing of the military’s new-ish counterinsurgency manual.  Gen. Richard Cody, the last Army vice chief, was loudly warning last year that the Army was putting too much effort into training for small, dirty wars.  I doubt rather strongly that Lt. Gen. Chiarelli, who’s served two tours in Iraq, is of the same opinion.

Thomas Barnett’s thoughts:

If Petraeus goes from CENTCOM to the CJCS, which many will now anticipate all the more, depending on his perceived success in this post, then he logically ends up as the pivotal player in military’s post-9/11 evolution, eclipsing Schoomaker and Rumsfeld by a ways.

U.S. Army Specialist Joshua Early, 24, sits with his family during his Purple Heart medal ceremony at Walter Reed Army Medical Center April 23, 2008 in Washington, DC. Early was wounded by an IED explosion while conductiong a raid in the Diyala Province of Iraq. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

A county-based decision tree.

Tim Haab reposts his rant against politicians meddling with gas prices:

Look, in all seriousness.  High gas prices are NOT an economic or political problem.  They are the result of the natural workings of markets.  There is nothing wrong with the market–and no reason, other than self-preservation and the false appearance of being able to do something, for politicians to intervene.  Supplies are decreasing–both temporarily through unexpected refinery shut-downs and permanently through stock depletion.  Demand is increasing–both in the U.S. and worldwide.  Both of these will cause gas prices to rise and that’s good.  If gas prices don’t rise, we will consume gas even faster and run out sooner.  Higher gas prices encourage conservation and encourage investment in alternatives.  High gas prices might be uncomfortable while we search for viable long-term solutions, but they’re more comfortable than the alternative: no gas and no solutions.

The WSJ has a profile of a friend and ex-lawyer who is now a song-writer in the finals of the American Idol composition contest. You can vote here.

Bill Clinton directly accuses the Obama campaign of hostility to working class voters. When you see the brutal politics the Clintons are still eagerly deploying, you have to believe this will go to the convention. The Clintons are prepared to use any argument, any Republican tactic, and any social or cultural division to stay in the game. By tactically morphing into Rove Republicans, they are deliberately pivoting off a myth about Obama to make him unelectable. I think the idea that they will withdraw when Obama reaches the actual number of delegates required for the nomination is a myth. They will insist on having their say at the convention and changing the votes of pledged delegates if they need to. This is their party, in their minds. Obama has no right to lead it. Until he waits his turn and the Clintons give their blessing.

To stay in the game, the level and suicidal quality of their attacks on Obama require a similar form of tactic in response. But Obama will not and should not go there. The one profound difference between him and the Clintons is that he will actually not do some things for the sake of power. God knows the Clontons have brought him to the verge of that – but pure cynicism would rebut his core message and destroy his candidacy as surely as the Clintons are trying to do. And to say what needs to be said about the Clintons – the truth about their character and their shared pathologies – would be a horribly divisive and brutal move. It would render the Clintons even more unelectable than they already are, undermine the Obama message and give the White House to the GOP. What’s striking to me about this race is that it is the young insurgent who is still acting as the responsible party elder; and the former president who is behaving like a man who will destroy his own party in order to soothe his own sense of entitlement and ego.

After this presidency, after eight years of war and debt and torture and deceit and cynicism, to see the Democratic party self-destruct is really something. They were given a chance to remake the country and regain their soul; and the Clintons could not bear it if they were not the vehicles for such a shift. I don’t believe anyone in the Democratic party can or will stop them. This is a kamikaze mission.

(Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty.)

Now a less common, common surname.

A reader writes:

Re: your response to Megan McCardle on war and torture, I wanted to point you to an exchange that James Poulos and I had several weeks ago about a similar set of questions. James had claimed that it was our "extreme queasiness with not only deploying large numbers of troops but with fighting a full-throated, full-throttle war" that forced us to "rely on a different set of extraordinary techniques to try to make up for the fact that we’re not prosecuting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as if the only goals there were military victory" – in other words, "our dark turn down the torture road is a consequence of our late-modern, small-l liberal nausea over real war". In response, I argued the contrary: rather than being an alternative to the imposition of "total war" on our enemies, the turn to torture was the product of a mindset that is inseparable from the one that drove us to war in the first place:

… in each case, the underlying conviction is that it is appropriate to resort to violence, not only as a direct punishment for wrongs already done, but with an eye to preventing future evils: we torture, not because the person at hand has already attacked us, but so that we can find out what he and his companions are planning to do and keep them from putting those plans into action; we invade Iraq, not because they actually did us any wrong, but because of the conviction that the best way to protect ourselves is by hitting the bad guys first. Once we have bought into the underlying idea, we find ourselves justifying torture with very much the same ease that we lend our voices to the cause of preemptive war.

My suggestion, in other words, was that while war crimes – or at least officially sanctioned/encouraged ones – aren’t essentially "part of the cost of war" (to use Megan’s phrase), they’re pretty much what we should expect when the war itself is one of aggression.

The discussion continued, as you might imagine, here, here, here, and here, and involved James coming up with a typically wonderful appellation – "The Waterboard of Wars" – for our involvement in Iraq.

And have a baby boy.