The Dish

A reader writes:

You can be such a shithead when you talk about lesbians, Andrew: That you "can understand" and that political dissent is not tolerated. I don’t know whether you just have some monolithic view of us from 15 years ago that you can’t let go of or what. Anyways, out of every girl I know NOBODY can stomach hillary, save one friend in Denver. And the demographic matches just about what we see other places. It’s probably a class split, with less educated tilting to Hillary.  I’m 33. I expect the women 20 years older than me have more Hillary support, but I haven’t seen it.

And the notion that she is somehow better for gay people is not a pervasive view among lesbians.  The diva factor you described is real and doesn’t work on us the same way it works on the HRC go go boys. The mudslinging she did claiming Obama was lying about his UC professorship got a lot of anger going among my set (lots of girls in the academy, REALLY don’t appreciate denigration of non-tenure track faculty); her vote on the war is a huge problem with lesbians, so many of whom are deeply anti-war.  Oh, and that she cheats and lies. That doesn’t help either.

Today:

How to create deterrence? The way John Kennedy did during the Cuban missile crisis. President Bush’s greatest contribution to nuclear peace would be to issue the following declaration, adopting Kennedy’s language while changing the names of the miscreants:

"It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear attack upon Israel by Iran, or originating in Iran, as an attack by Iran on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Iran."

Two years ago:

Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?

Is Iran deterrable or not? And if it is, why is Israel’s own nuclear deterrence not enough? Joe Klein weighs in here.

Michael Scherer studies McCain’s position on torture. Marc summarizes McCain’s stance. My own view and distinct recall of the passage of the Military Commissions Act is that McCain blinked – and is still blinking in the face of massive pressure from the torture-wing of the GOP, which has at its center the vice-president’s office. Largely, I think McCain’s stand has been admirable; but it would not be intellectually honest to describe it as steadfast. Maybe if he gets to be president, this nightmare will end. But his legislative actions have ensured legal immunity for the civilian war criminals and the possible continuation of torture under Cheney’s and Bush’s extra-legal rule.

Begala has at Penn. It is also, sadly, hard not to feel the same thing about Begala. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say in public something that wasn’t purely designed to achieve a political end. He was trained by the Clintons well.

He’s earned tens of millions – but still costs tax-payers almost twice as much as any other ex-president.

They are now using his staggeringly honest autobiography against him, using out-of-context quotes to make him seem like a racist. Yes, the repellent Coulter – still treated as a legitimate voice on the far right – has called Obama’s book a dime-store "Mein Kampf." Sometimes I wonder if some white Republicans actually believe that black people in this country have no reason to feel any anger or alienation at times. I’m not talking about letting it consume you – just feeling it, dealing with it, managing it.

I guess I might feel the same way as these sheltered folk if I weren’t gay. But anger is a totally legitimate thing to feel when you grow up and realize you will never be allowed to celebrate a marriage or build a family like your parents or siblings. It is totally legitimate when your emotional core is constantly ridiculed, demeaned and even treated as a sickness or a sin. It became a necessity when hundreds of thousands died while others looked on, or persecuted the sick with segregation or disdain, or blamed them for their disease. It is totally understandable when even now, after living in this country for 24 years, with a family and a home, I have to seek a waiver from the government every year to allow me to stay in this country because I have HIV, and only people married to a member of the opposite sex are treated like human beings if immigrants. The government denies you family, dignity and even a secure home – and you are never supposed to feel anger?

My "conservative" position in gay politics has never been that anger is wrong. It is that it cannot provide the full answer. It’s a trap that can destroy you if you allow it to. We have to get beyond anger to explain, engage, persuade, reason, integrate … in order to make anger less relevant to the next generation. With gays, each generation springs afresh from new heterosexual homes and families, and so healing can be relatively fast, even if it is never easy. But with African-Americans, these disadvantages and resentments and feelings are more easily passed from generation to generation, and skin color can act as a constant, unpassable feature of your life that can drive you crazy if you do not master it. Economics entrenches this. You have to be blind not to see the pathos of so many trapped in this. Conservatives should be able to see this pain, and help alleviate it in ways that make sense (not socialism or big government dependency), not dismiss it as a form of hatred.

The great spiritual gift of Obama is that he has mastered this – not by suppressing it or denying it. But by confronting it, looking at it, expressing it, and channeling it to better ends. That some on the far right would now use this process of honesty as a way to describe Obama as a racist is a sign of their cramped hearts, frightened souls and utter inability to empathize. One day, they will feel ashamed. Right now, they simply have to be overcome.

(Photo: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty.)

Not-so-fast. Phillip Carter writes about actual combat tour length:

Most soldiers I know greeted yesterday’s news about the reduction in combat-tour lengths with a great deal of cynicism. It’s not that they don’t appreciate the reduction — they do, and their families most certainly do. It’s just that even a 12-month tour is such a hardship, such a departure from the deployment models used before the Iraq war strained the Army to its breaking point.

I can only imagine the profane responses from soldiers in Iraq when they heard the news — particularly the point that the shorter tours only apply to troops deploying to Iraq after Aug. 1, 2008.

That’s his surrogate at the Log Cabin Republican convention – something Bush never did to my knowledge. McCain has said he’ll meet with LCR’s leadership. If you want a sign that Rove’s bigotry may not define the GOP in this election cycle, this is a small, slender reed of hope. McCain should support some kind of civil union for gay couples. He’d bring a lot of moderate Republicans with him if he dropped the total, blanket hostility to legal protection for gay relationships that the national GOP now upholds. More from the convention here.

Tapper checks Bill’s latest flim-flam on Bosnia. Man, has that old pol lost his touch.

Michael Yon argues that it’s more important than statistics or over-arching calcification of the "political" system. And he says it’s changed dramatically since the change in US strategy:

As the outrages of Abu Ghraib faded in memory – and paled in comparison to al Qaeda’s brutalities – and our soldiers under the Petraeus strategy got off their big bases and out of their tanks and deeper into the neighborhoods, American values began to win the war.

Iraqis came to respect American soldiers as warriors who would protect them from terror gangs. But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic, school or a neighborhood. They learned that the American soldier is not only the most dangerous enemy in the world, but one of the best friends a neighborhood can have.

This is obviously a subjective and anecdotal inference, as Yon concedes. But it may be true – I cannot know this far away – and worth adding to the equation.