The Dish

Observers have long worried about the over-crowded and chaotic detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, where torture and murder of detainees has occurred under the command of George W. Bush. Now another ominous sign:

In a confidential memorandum last summer, the Red Cross said dozens of prisoners had been held incommunicado for weeks or even months in a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells at Bagram, two American officials said. The Red Cross said the prisoners were kept from its inspectors and sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions, one of the officials said.

By the end of this administration, the Geneva Conventions will have suffered a bigger blow from their original champion than any in their history.

Positive reviews from Greg Mankiw and Andrew Samwick. Mankiw:

Obama shows extraordinary clarity and honesty about the effects of the policy he is proposing.

Boston, Massachusetts, 2.30 pm.

A reader writes:

I am square in the middle of the boomer generation, and female. I have been meaning to write and say that younger people are not the only ones who respond to Obama. You are starting to use "boomers" in the same way you have for a long time used "left," as a mindless, lazy, overgeneralizing all-purpose blame container.

Blaming never helps.  Sometimes it’s important to assess responsibility, but that’s a different thing, and it won’t be accomplished with labels like "the left," "the right," "boomers," or whatever, because those labels are so overbroad as to be meaningless in any complex analysis.  "Boomers" are people, just like your generation.  Being people, they are just as varied as any other group you could put a label on.  Being people, they are a maddening mixture of virtues and vices, good habits and bad.  Being people, many of them wanted to leave the world "better" (and yes, definitions differ) than they had found it.  They — we — did no better, but also no worse in my opinion, than any generation before us.

The world is a mess today not because it has boomers in it, but because it has humans in it.  I totally agree that there are deep-seated destructive habits shaping our national discourse, and that my generation has helped to create and indulge those habits; one of the reasons Obama brings tears to my eyes is that he offers a hope that we might actually shape some newer and less destructive habits.  You aren’t helping by driving a wedge between generations.

As bad at spinning as he is at polling.

"I was simply incorrect." I mentioned the fib here. Good for Romney for fessing up to it. But it’s another moment when his desire to close the sale sometimes leads him into factual inexactitude.

The most respected poll in New Hampshire, which had Obama and Clinton very close, now shows an Obama 10 point blow-out. It also gives McCain a 6 point lead. If Romney cannot win his neighboring state … ?

Guess who he thinks did well:

Oliver Wendall Holmes [sic] once famously remarked about FDR that the president had a A "second-class intellect but a first-class temperament."

Tonight’s debate – by far the best of this long campaign – allowed Mitt Romney to display not only a first class temperament but also a first class intellect.

But, hey, he might be right this time. Josh Marshall:

8:37 PM … Mitt’s a big improvement tonight in as much as he is avoiding utter humiliation.

8:42PM … Mitt actually has a pretty good statement of his qualifications for the presidency, as a governor vs. a senator. If you set aside what a complete phony Mitt is it was really convincing.

"I find the manner in which they’ve been running their campaign sort of depressing, lately. It was interesting in the debate, Sen. Clinton saying ‘don’t feed the American people false hopes. Get a reality check, you know?’ I mean, you can picture JFK saying, ‘we can’t go to the moon, it’s a false hope. Let’s get a reality check.’ It’s not, sort of, I think, what our tradition has been," – Barack Obama.

A reader writes:

I’ve just read the 24-year old college grad who shouldn’t be prone to the moment.  As a peer of his, I’m 27, and as someone who works to create such "moments" (I’m a political media consultant) I also shouldn’t be prone to "the moment."  And yet, like your reader, I am filled with a feeling I have rarely felt in my 7 years in politics: hope. Real hope, not manufactured hope or a belief that hope will manifest itself "later."

Your reader wrote, "Why, then, do I get sucked in by Obama?" Why? Because deep down this is what we all want.  From the earliest days of elementary school American history we are taught of the American dream. Of how this great experiment in self-rule was built on the hopes and dreams of the founding generation. This country is their dream, a living dream, more so than any other country is the dream of their founders.

In kindergarten we dream of being astronauts, firemen, ballerinas, super heroes and, yes, presidents.  Dreaming is our national narrative, it is one of the most basic things that makes us human and not animal.  We yearn to dream with our leaders.

President Bush never seemed to dream, and drew his power from our fears instead of hopes.  His predecessor seemed to be a dreamer, but never asked us to dream.  Nor did Bush the first.  After 19 years – a lifetime for many first-time voters –  we want what our American history text books promised us: we want to dream.  That’s why we’re drawn to Obama.

Whenever I hear Obama speak the way he did in Boston in 2004, at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa or during his victory speech on caucus night I dream.

(Photos: Jim Reany and Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)