The Dish

"Oh yes, we are well aware of Senator Obama’s morally unacceptable position on abortion. No Catholic can or will endorse the taking of innocent life. Indeed, conscience could not just dissuade, but directly preclude, casting a vote in his column. However, Catholic moral teaching enjoins us to work to transform the culture in every vineyard, not just those that are friendly. And Senator Obama has courageously and intriguingly opened a window of opportunity for important conversation across faith traditions, by reminding us that "we should not use faith as a wedge to divide, but instead use faith to resolve cultural tensions and mediate conflicts rather than engage in a politics that exploits them and drives us further from a solution …
To date, Senator Obama has kept the essence of his campaign at the level of the statesmen, which is why many Catholics, including myself, find this to be a favorable comparison to the memory of Ronald Wilson Reagan," – Douglas Kmiec, responding to Ramesh Ponnuru, in NRO.

His orthodox Catholic defense of Obama over McCain can be read here. I don’t agree with all of Kmiec’s views, but I do believe that Obama’s sensibility and public conduct are appealing to most of the Catholics I know.

Clinton 44, Obama 42. Those kinds of numbers suggest an Obama victory over all.

The English language will never be the same.

It all depends on what the meaning of the word "waterboarding" is, apparently:

Let’s be very clear: This so-called "analysis" is at the very core of the OLC justification for waterboarding, and possibly several other components of the CIA program, as well. And it is flatly, 100% wrong, and indefensible, for reasons I have discussed at length. The fact that Judge Mukasey continues to abide by it is a scandal. And the fact that Congress has not said a word about this legal linchpin of the OLC/CIA regime is even worse.

The rather banal view of "bringing people together" is such a cliche and so clumsy a phrase when describing Barack Obama’s history of coalition politics. Jeff Rosen, who seems almost as smitten as I am, describes (reg req.) one such Obama moment:

After Obama was elected to the Illinois state Senate in 1996, he defended individual rights in a way that might have marginalized him: He joined only two other senators in voting against a bill to forbid convicts on probation from having contact with street gangs, and he voted against a bill to expand the death penalty to gang-related murders. But Obama nevertheless won the respect of police and prosecutors in Chicago by building those "alliances of consent."

One of his greatest legislative triumphs was a bill to require the videotaping of all confessions and interrogations in capital cases. Initially, police, state prosecutors, and the newly elected Democratic governor were strongly opposed, some death-penalty abolitionists viewed the bill as too moderate, and legislators were afraid of being soft on crime. But Obama led daily negotiations (without reporters) during which he emphasized his opponents’ common values. At the end, the bill had the support of all parties, passed unanimously, and today has been adopted as a model by four states and the District of Columbia.

Josh Green on the brutal baseball hearings:

Professional sports and official Washington have much in common. Neither is a stranger to steroidally overdeveloped egos or grand displays of power. But as so often happens when the two worlds collide, yesterday’s hearing was a massacre—and, as usual, professional sports didn’t see it coming. It looked to me as though Clemens and the many sports media types in attendance were genuinely taken aback by the primal, dog-in-heat urgency with which these grandstanding nobodies tore apart a sports legend.

The political reporters, however, were not the slightest bit phased. This highlights a crucial disparity that I think the sports world has never truly appreciated, and that helps to explain the disastrous string of recent appearances by major sports figures in Washington: sports and politics both thrive on ego, money, and power. But only in Washington is the ritual humiliation that Clemens experienced a deeply ingrained and important part of the culture.

Chicago, Illinois, 3.30 pm.

It gets better:

U.S. health officials are urging that Gulf Coast hurricane victims be moved out of their government-issued trailers as quickly as possible after tests found toxic levels of formaldehyde fumes.

By focusing on waterboarding, we can sometimes forget that the other "alternative techniques" for "enhanced interrogation" are also forms of torture, even when they leave no permanent marks, or, in the words of AEI’s John Yoo, do not cause major organ failure. The term "stress position" for example, when uttered by someone like Rush Limbaugh, who described some of what happened at Abu Ghraib as nothing more serious than fraternity hazing, can seem banal, even defensible. These positions, which the president strongly supports, can nonetheless become very quickly hideous acts of cruelty. Here’s a photo of what the Nazis called Pfahlbinden.

You can seen that individuals are contorted just by the weight of their own bodies into positions of excruciating pain that lasts until it is unbearable. In this picture, it does not appear that the methods are being used to interrogate. They are being used for sadistic purposes. They are worse thah the ‘stress positions" we have evidence of in US custody because the Nazi prisoners were literally suspended in the air, their feet barely touching the ground.. But the victums of US stress positions were chained to fixtures and wall with hands chained above and behind the head, with feet barely on the ground. They had a tiny  bit more support for their feet, but it often made the procedure longer and in end, therefore, more painful.

When you hear a banal phrase like "stress position", and hear people dismiss it, remember that everything is in the doing. And when human beings are given total control over others, they are capable of great evil. Sane and civilized societies do not give permission for such things. And they do not make excuses for them. And when they discover they have been done, they investigate and prosecute those who broke the law.

I was working on a post on the subject – about the GOP’s tendency to denialism of extreme remaining danger and its facile conflation of the surge with the occupation – but Ross beat me to it. It’s a really sharp post. McCain is playing a very bold game of risk on the war. And this entire election will be driven by it.