The Dish

Daniel McCarthy defends Matt’s suggestion that the GOP would be better off in the Senate races if its candidates opposed the war:

That strategy didn’t seem to work too well for Lincoln Chafee in 2006. Antiwar House Republicans John Hostettler and Jim Leach also lost their seats. The Chafee example doesn’t disprove Yglesias’s point, however. What it shows is lone dissenters have a hard time escaping from the downward drag of the party line: Lincoln Chafee did lose in large part because the Republicans were pro-war, even though he wasn’t. As long as the GOP is committed to the war, outlying dissenters risk getting shot by both sides: antiwar voters blame them for their party affiliation, while the party base may reject them for deviating from the Republican line.

An entertaining defense of poetry.

(Hat tip: Frank Wilson)

The Onion gets it, as usual.

Michael Hirschorn has a fantastic article in this month’s Atlantic on the campaigns’ digital personas and the increased value of genuineness for the YouTube generation:

McCain understood this new culture of authenticity intuitively even during the 2000 election, when he branded his campaign the “Straight Talk Express.” In this endlessly mediated age, even authenticity is a form of branding. Indeed, precisely because we live in an era of endlessly manipulable images, authenticity is the most truly prized brand attribute. But McCain, 100 percent authentic or not, has compellingly sold realness, and may do so all the way to the White House.

This is why an Obama-McCain match-up would be the most engrossing in recent memory: not only an opportunity to see two master communicators go at each other but a chance to alter political discourse for good. The old political speech has started sounding so canned that we literally cannot hear it. I could listen to Hillary all day without really understanding a word she says. It’s not just the unearned intimacy; it’s the way everything seems manipulated and focus-tested by teams of professionals to the point where it becomes a kind of elision, a non-speak.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old?

Continued here. Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems can be bought here.

In what is the first of several explosive installments of "The Torture Team," Philippe Sands reveals that the torture advocates in the White House, including the president, vice-president, defense secretary, Powell and Rice, deceived the senior military into believing that the Geneva Conventions were still in force. Myers’ defection is a critical break in bringing these war crimes to light. Money quote:

The Bush administration has tried to explain away the ill-treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by blaming junior officials. Sands’ book establishes that pressure for aggressive and cruel treatment of detainees came from the top and was sanctioned by the most senior lawyers.

Myers was one top official who did not understand the implications of what was being done. Sands, who spent three hours with the former general, says he was "confused" about the decisions that were taken.

Myers mistakenly believed that new techniques recommended by Haynes and authorised by Rumsfeld in December 2002 for use by the military at Guantánamo had been taken from the US army field manual. They included hooding, sensory deprivation, and physical and mental abuse.

"As we worked through the list of techniques, Myers became increasingly hesitant and troubled," writes Sands. "Haynes and Rumsfeld had been able to run rings around him."

Myers and his closest advisers were cut out of the decision-making process. He did not know that Bush administration officials were changing the rules allowing interrogation techniques, including the use of dogs, amounting to torture.

In the end, the full truth will come out.

From by J. Bottum’s 2000 article, an enjoyable enough diatribe against needless music:

…the truth is that we all are terrorized by music nowadays. It’s not so much the high school kids parading down the street with boom boxes, or the college students partying away a Saturday afternoon, or the insomniac in the next apartment pacing up and down to Beethoven at 3:00 a.m. It’s, rather, the merciless stream of 1960s golden oldies drenching suburban malls, the disco-revival radio thumping out Donna Summer in the back of a taxi all the way to the airport, the tinny Muzak bleating from storefronts as you walk along the sidewalk, the tastefully muted Andrew Lloyd Webber seeping from recessed speakers above the urinals in the men’s room. America is drowning in sanctioned music — an obligatory orchestration cramming every inch of public space. There’s hardly a bar in which to nurse a quiet drink or a café in which you don’t have to shout your order above the upbeat swing of 1940s big-band standards.

Perhaps it was Hollywood that taught us to expect life to come with background music, a constant melodic commentary on the movie of our lives. But we are soundtracked nowadays with relentless demands for only the most obvious and officially appropriate emotions.

In case you missed the worst song of all time, you can find it here.

You won’t forget this rendition of "Amazing Grace."

A clever idea, but it probably wouldn’t work so well in my homeland.

Ben Macintyre writes

In most cases this is not active deception, but rather a strange cultural blurring of truth and fiction, the confusion of first-hand knowledge with second-hand electronic cuttings, the elision of personal experience with a reality borrowed or imagined from elsewhere.

This is the victory of information over experience. In Wiki-world, where so much semi-reliable information is available at the push of a button, there is no need to see something first-hand in order to be able to describe it with conviction and authority. A comparison of Paris guidebooks reveals entire chunks of identical text for some tourist spots: why actually visit somewhere to find out what it is like when one can merely paste together a version of reality?[…]

The plagiarism of words is a familiar crime, but the plagiarising of experience is something more subtle, and far harder to detect. “I never read a book before reviewing it,” declared Sidney Smith. “It prejudices a man so.” There is now an entire literary subculture devoted to the art of not-reading books, but pretending to have done so.