The Dish

Matt Yglesias tries to figure out why Clinton is attacking Obama on Iraq. Because it’s his strength – and attacking someone’s core strength directly is a classic campaign tactic. Well, classic if you take the advice of this guy.

"We evangelicals must rethink our engagement with politics. The place to start is by remembering that the church is not a branch of a political party and that its distinctive identity and mission must be protected, both for the sake of the church and for the sake of our culture and the world," – David P. Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University and president of Evangelicals for Human Rights.

It’s hard to disagree with this:

"When you listen to that tone and the inflection, he was not talking about community organizing. It seems to me very clear what he was implying."

Bill Clinton cannot really defend it. But tries.

Obama’s campaign has a memo detailing all the racially unfortunate statements of the Clintons recently.

Eli Lake suggests a change from "Islamo-fascists." I think it’s a way to elide the distinction between Sunnis and Shiites. The question is: who wants to do this and why?

They’re hurting, and now suing PornoTube. You can see the dilemma:

"Two or three minutes — that’s all you need," Hirsch says. "After watching two or three minutes of hard-core sex, you’re not going to go and buy the full movie."

Natural selection keeps you glued to the web:

We evolved to get high whenever we learn something.

"For a government bureaucrat to call any publisher or anyone else to an interrogation to be quizzed about his political or religious expression is a violation of 800 years of common law, a Universal Declaration of Rights, a Bill of Rights and a Charter of Rights. This commission is applying Saudi values, not Canadian values," – Ezra Levant, interrogated for publishing cartoons of Muhammad in Canada.

The benign interpretation of the Clintons’ evocation of the importance of an LBJ to complement an MLK is about the need for legislative activity to enshrine the vital work of civil rights activists. As such, it’s a perfectly reasonable analogy to make, if a little condescending to King. But does it reflect who the Clintons actually are? Are they really today’s version of LBJ? In fact, unlike most others in this race, we have some direct evidence of how the Clintons, given the power of the White House, responded to the civil rights movement of their own time.

In the 1990s, we saw a burst of grass-roots activism, protest and rhetoric in defense of gay and lesbian equality. Out of the ashes of the AIDS epidemic, the gay rights movement rose like a phoenix. And the Clintons, seeing a fund-raising opportunity, reached out to some in the movement to finance their own campaign. Those donors trusted them. I wrote the TNR endorsement. But as soon as the gays had performed their role – financing the Clintons in power and supporting their campaign – the Clintons turned on us. They dropped their promise to end the military’s ban instantaneously and then presided over a doubling of the discharges of gay servicemembers under the hideous "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy. They then used the other emerging civil rights issue – marriage equality – to triangulate against gay couples. They ran ads on Christian radio stations bragging about the Defense of Marriage Act that president Clinton eagerly signed. And the only gay people they embraced were those willing to continue to trade money for access – and loyalty to the Clintons. Who helped them devise this anti-gay strategy? Dick Morris. Who recommended hiring him in the first place? Hillary Clinton.

Johnson risked his entire coalition on the issue of civil rights – a heroic act that still reverberates today. The Clintons wouldn’t risk a smidgen of a percentage point in a Mark Penn poll for the duration of a news cycle. That’s the difference.