The Dish

A straight rugby player signs calendars of himself for gay fans in Soho, London:

Proceeds from the calendar will raise money for Orchid Charity Trust, which aims to fight testicular cancer, and the Northamptonshire Air Ambulance Service.

Ben Cohen, who was unable to make the Rugby World Cup earlier this year as his wife was expecting twins, looked really relaxed in store as he signed calendars, chatted to fans and posed for photos.

When asked what they thought of a straight sports star courting his gay fanbase in this way,  Prowler shoppers were very positive about the move.

"I think it’s fantastic. For a sportsman to do this for gay fans, I think is brilliant and many more should follow. As society gets more and more tolerant, more sports stars should come out and support us – because we support them," said rugby fan Paul from Brighton, who was at the signing.

More news of gay integration here.

A reader writes:

The New Yorker report you cited is so bad it is scary. If this is what you are reading to figure out what is going then you need a better source. This article is riddled with incorrect facts and easements. It doesn’t just get things sorta wrong, it gets them 180 degrees wrong.

Unfortunately I can’t go through every part of the article, because much of what I would say is classified. I’ll just comment on the part you quoted from a Sheikh Zaidan. Sheikh Zaidan is not a "prominent Sunni tribal leader" at all.  Actually, he is a nobody with no tribal power or constituency who probably isn’t even a Sheikh and who is likely still involved with the insurgency.  The insurgency has been beaten so bad in Anbar that he is forced to cool his rhetoric.  Of course they didn’t make us "crawl on our stomachs".  What happened was, we were killing insurgents like it was cool and the insurgents were killing Iraqis like it was cool.  The tribes realized they were getting wiped out at both ends.

They also realized they didn’t much care for the hard core insurgents, so they decided to join us.  With the tribes and US forces working together, it simply left no room for the insurgents.  They either had to die, quite or leave.  Zaidan is not in the Awakening movement and doesn’t know anything about it.  I’d be willing to bet my next three paychecks that the Awakening movement would put a bullet in Zaidan without too much prompting because of his insurgent activities.  So his analysis of what the Awakening movement is and what it is doing is laughable.  Also, Sunnis aren’t clearing out Baghdad.  They are working with Shia Awakening movements to clear out Baghdad of both AQi (Sunni) and JAM (Shia) insurgents.

Also, just in case you were not aware – the Awakening movement, although Sunni based, has been explicitly and strongly non sectarian since its inception.  Now that the Awakening movement has largely cleared Anbar of Insurgents they have shifted focus in a major way to Shia outreach.  Clearly Zaidan is a Sunni extremist which make his opinions all the more laughable.  People like him are marginalized even in Anbar which is strongly Sunni.

Of course AQI is a "spent force" because we killed it.  Remember that 14 Months ago everybody was saying that Anbar was lost to AQI and the US should leave the province immediately.  Now it is the safest place in Iraq.  The same is currently happening in the rest of Iraq just with a lag.  A year from know everybody will be talking about how JAM is a spent force and there is nowhere left for insurgents to go.

My case for John McCain:

McCain looks better not just because he has stuck to his pro-war position while acknowledging painful reality, but because the others have increasingly looked so unnerving. Romney’s plastic demeanour and say-anything style have not caught on outside the first two states where he has poured millions of his own money into blanket television advertising. Thompson has yet to seem a viable president. Giuliani’s bizarre personal quirks and all-purpose, random hawkishness do not calm nerves in a very unstable world. Fellow Republican candidate Mike Huckabee is a jovial inheritor of Bush’s spend-like-Jesus conservatism, but has zero foreign policy experience. And so . . . we come back to McCain.

It’s obviously his turn. He was runner-up in 2000 and a loyal Bushie (through gritted teeth) in 2004. He’s more reliably pro-life than any of the other big names; he is extremely well versed in foreign policy; and his integrity on the detention and interrogation question makes him the sole Republican president who could reassure the world that the US will not continue to torture prisoners. He’s also able to appeal to independents in a way no other Republican can – except Rudy on a very good day.

One other core issue: climate change. McCain gets it. No one else does on the GOP side. If you take the IPCC seriously, and I see no reason not to, this matters a great deal. Compare two potential races next year: Clinton vs Giuliani or McCain vs Obama. One would bring out the worst in us; the other would move this country forward in desperately needed ways.

(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty.)

A reader writes:

Your Dissent of the Day on Obama irked me enough to write.

"What has Obama done except demonstrate his out-of-control ambition? He was a community organizer but that was in the black community. What he has done for whites?"

I completely disagree with the notions that because someone is interested in helping black people that that is anything less than trying to help a portion of humanity. I can’t help but feel that your correspondent is not being honest with him or herself, because if Obama were a huckster like Sharpton, I would understand that trepidation, but with Obama? Really? Was Obama representing only black interests in the Illinois Senate? Was he only teaching about black law as professor of constitutional law? Is he only representing the black people of Illinois in the US Senate? Is his message of transcending differences and hope only about black people? The notion is absurd.

Also, as to the question of Obama’s giving back: As head of the Harvard Law Review, he could have completely cashed in after graduating from Harvard Law School. He could have done anything, but what did he choose to do? Help people less fortunate than him, teach, and go into public service. Sounds pretty good to me–like a man who has his priorities straight, like a man who really believes in old-fashioned civics. What your correspondent doesn’t seem to understand is that Obama has an interesting combination of communitarian and universal notion of politics, ethics, and society. Going to live in, work with, and help the black community in the South Side of Chicago helped him understand his place in society as a black man. (Also, as you have noticed, so did his conversion to Christianity, which I also see as a conscience choice to join a community whose values he already held. A really mature choice in my view—Hitchens et. Al could learn something from that.) Why should resent that? I don’t; I admire it. Growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia with a white mother and grandparents, clearly made him wonder about what African Americans were facing in the USA–your correspondent surely doesn’t deny that race matters in our society—so it is good that he went out into the world to find out. 

In the end, I dissent from and strenously object to these attempts to awaken resentment in me. It is this sort of thing that has traumatized our politics–distracting us from the big questions of the day: global warming, healthcare, torture, the economy, and our civil liberties.

What’s really going on between both the Obama campaign’s swift response to the blind Novak item about some alleged dirt coming his way and Clinton’s super-swift retort in turn? Mark Halperin talks about it here. Daniel Larison echoes the Clinton line that all this reflects Obama’s "inexperience."

Here’s a more paranoid explanation: at some point in this campaign, if you believe the Washington rumor mill, there may well be some Clinton bimbo eruption stories, i.e. Bill’s post-presidential extracurricular activities will come under discussion again. This Novak flap therefore may be a dummy-run for the various responses if such alleged doodoo eventually hits the campaign fan. The story would be relevant again not so much because of Bill but because of Hillary. She is now the candidate and would be forced to respond to such allegations if they became in any way legit. Would any self-respecting wife simply dismiss stories of her husband’s possible adultery as self-evident VRCW sleaze – for a second time? How credible, after Lewinsky, would such a dismissal be? And how important then to set a marker down now that all such stories are to be ignored by "experienced Democrats," as Howard Wolfson puts it?

I may not care about the personal details of a president’s marriage, but, given the Clintons’ history, purple state Americans may not be so sure. The story could remind them of the psychodramas of the 1990s, dramas that impeded a president’s ability to govern. It could remind them of how hollowed out Hillary Clinton’s psyche has had to become – as a consequence of enabling her husband’s foibles as the price for her own political advancement. Either way, the GOP would love it. If Rudy’s the nominee, the "scandal" would insulate him from Christianist moralizing about his private life. If Romney’s the nominee, it will merely entrench his rep as the squeaky clean family man against that crazy Clinton couple. That’s why the Republicans are more than happy to keep these stories under wraps until after the primaries.

But isn’t that a reason for the Obama camp to draw attention to them now – before it’s too late? Maybe the Obama response to an alleged Obama story is not a function, pace Larison, of "flailing" and inexperience, but a calculated bid to force Clinton’s biggest liability out into the open before she gets the nomination? I have no inside information on this, and no solid evidence of either an Obama "scandal" or a Clinton one, but the stakes are very high for all the reasons I’ve speculated on. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

A reader writes:

I canvassed two middle aged white male voters in California today: my husband and his best friend. Both are registered as Independents. Both will vote for Obama in the California primary Feb. 3rd. The friend says if Hillary gets the Dem. nomination, he will vote for any Republican except Romney in the general. Hubby says if Hillary gets the nomination, he will not vote.

A reader writes:

That was the best dissent of the day? Ouch. I would love to see the others.  Really. I’d love to know the depths of strangeness that your inbox fills with. I’m weird like that. Rebuttal to the dissent: As an independent, I don’t need to relate to Sen. Obama. He is a half-black lawyer with a disjointed childhood, I am a pasty white computer nerd with a stable family, and it is not going to happen. Obama actually has figured out what the Democrats have been blind to all this time. 1.) Show up  2.) Give me a reason  3.) Do not try to enamor me.

Democrats are so afraid I won’t love them if they do something unpleasant.  I guess they don’t know that I will never fall in love with them – ever – yet still I have this elected seat I need filled.

I am pretty sure that Obama, a very young post-identity crisis civil rights lawyer, is still the front of the pack because he is not wasting his campaigning time pleasing everyone, instead spending that time articulating a post-43 argument.  So the small groups — those that are invisible, those that are expensive to appease, those that are underpopulated — are coming to him of their own volition.  Cost-free to the campaign.

Your dissenter does have part of a point that your hatred of Hillary is a little over the top.  But I can tell it is not that you dislike the person; it is that she is the pinnacle of Democratic appeasement and cynicism.  I’m with you on that.  Her career is tarnished with the many small things she has done to hedge her career, and it is very hard to like her.  On the opposite side, it is very easy to like a first-term Senator that’s taken his career over the cliff just for a singular notion.

A lovely piece of meandering fondness from Richard Stern.

They’re back. I knew it would happen.

(Photo: Laurence Griffiths/Getty.)

A reader writes:

Thanks (from one who fought in Vietnam, dissented from it, and is disheartened by today’s bitter divisiveness and wrong-road direction of a once great nation). I can follow Obama’s vision of who we are, where we should be headed, and what we need to do.