The Dish

Eric Black ponders the meaning of the departure of Rachel Paulose.

A classic, I’d say. I’d reiterate what I wrote when I first posted this:

If you were gay and young in the 1980s, the pop music was a form of emancipation and revelation. Early PSBs, Erasure and Bronski Beat captured the breakthrough. Many of us as teens lived in small towns and yearned for the big city. And no music video spoke to our lives as powerfully as "Smalltown Boy." Even now, it chokes me up.

You can vote for it here, or pick from nine others in the Best category:

With the deletion of TimesDelete, the NYT just had a record month online. More here.

The novelist and Hitch-chum Martin Amis has been catching a lot of flak for Steyn-like utterances about  Muslims. The line between perfectly reasonable – and important – criticism of Islamism and even Islam, and sweeping statements about all Muslims is a vital one to maintain, it seems to me. The reason is that the former criticisms are so important they need to be shielded from legitimate accusations of bigotry. Amis seems to me to have teetered very close to the line, if not tripped over it. Here’s the relevant passage that has provoked some harrumphing from the left:

""There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.’"

On its face, you can see the logic, especially with the opening qualification. Being able to say some things candidly – about Islam’s treatment of women, Jews and gays, about the backwardness of much of Muslim Middle East, about the anti-intellectual bullying of Islamist thought – is vital. But these important critiques will get overwhelmed by bigotry if we are not extremely careful. And musing about mass punishment of all Muslims is Malkinian. Ronan Bennett protests here. Kamila Shamsie seconds here. Pickled Politics gets into a, er, pickle here. Memo to the pickles: try not to criticize bigots by calling other people "inbreds", ok?

David Bernstein got the blogosphere roiling with this post:

Ron Paul is a tempting protest vote, and I did support him in 1988 when he ran as a Libertarian, but he strikes me as running less of a "libertarian" campaign than a pacifist, populist campaign that does have some appeal to young and idealistic libertarians, but has too much appeal to the old, paranoid, and racist pseudo-conservatives. There seems to be a right-wing version of the Popular Front mentality among many Paul supporters: just like it was okay for Social Democrats to ally with Stalinists for "Progressive" ends in the old days, it’s okay to ally with 9/11 and various other conspiracy theorists, southern secessionists, Nazis and fascists, anti-Semites and racists, against the common enemy of the modern "welfare-warfare" state. Count me out!

The guilt-by-association thing seems unfair to me. Matt Barganier agrees. Ditto the Rockwell brigade. But this post might prove Bernstein’s point:

Note that southern secessionists are lumped in with the rest of the laundry list. So support of a political tactic of disunion and decentralization has also become a thought crime?

One libertarian has Bernstein’s back, but David can defend himself:

Paul certainly has the potential to be the best thing that has happened to libertarianism as a political movement in a long time. He also has the potential to be the worst thing, if, as he gets more public exposure libertarianism gets associated in the public mind with 9/11 truther, southern irredentists, "white nationalists," and so forth.

It would be pretty easy for Paul to distance himself from some of the kooks who will always gravitate to a non-interventionist, small government candidacy. I don’t know why he hasn’t. But I also think that the Iraq war and the massive spending and anti-federalist impulses of the current GOP make Paul’s candidacy important – as a corrective to abuse and a reminder of some core conservative principles.

Another one insinuating that Edwards doesn’t spend enough time with this terminally sick wife? Ugh. Ana comments here. Mark Blumenthal thinks there’s less there than meets the eye. I hope so.

David Boaz gets all nostalgic here. Full Opus strip from last weekend here.