The Dish

Out of rehab and in Beverly Hills.

As eye-opening as Fallows in China. Except Jim has to keep his eyes and mouth closed some of the time.

This reader understands why I fear what’s coming:

You write:

The inference is: American liberty is over for a generation or two.

The reality is that it would be over, period.

I don’t doubt Posner’s assertion that the temper and culture of the U.S. couldn’t sustain repeated terror attacks. I’ve always wondered how Israel manages to do that; anything like it here and it”d be full-on martial law. Could you imagine how cable news – Fox in particular – would report additional attacks? Fanning the flames, creating a population (or the image of one) "demanding" additional safeguards. Warrantless wiretapping, torture – we wouldn’t be having these debates. We’d adopt it wholesale, and much more. And it would indeed be the end of freedom as we’ve known it.

I don’t think Clinton would resist it. I think Giuliani would embrace it enthusiastically and be backed by Fox, whose creature he has been and will become. It’s one reason I lean toward Paul and Obama. I think they are among the very few candidates who actually understand what civil liberty is.

Joe Galloway remembers a time when Americans knew what torture was.

A reader writes:

Whatever your faults, you’re eternally forgiven, now and forever, in exchange for doing the good deed of further exposing the world to Catherine Tate.

Another comedy classic here.

But what would the blogosphere do all day?

One should not expect intellectual honesty from Norman Podhoretz. After being informed that a quote he attributed to a British minister was actually an April Fool’s joke, NPod, despite having access to Google, refused to acknowledge it was inaccurate. So I have no hope he will respond to this post at the Economist raising questions about a quote by the Ayatollah Khomeini that Podhoretz has been using in his campaign to attack Iran as soon as possible. The quote came from Amir Taheri, a man whose reliability has scorched me in the past as well. But at least I concede an error when I make one, however innocently.

One wrinkle pointed out by a reader is that when you examine the second-choices of Democrats in Iowa in the NYT/CBS poll, you find that Clinton is significantly behind both Edwards and Obama. Edwards gets 25 percent of the second choice voters; Obama 24 percent; and Clinton only 16 percent. I get the feeling that many Edwards and Obama supporters like each other more than they care for the Clinton machine. In caucuses, that can make a difference. Maybe she’ll finish third.

A reader nails it:

Isn’t everyone missing an essential element of this episode? At the end of the interview with the waitress, a self-described "independent " she announces emphatically that she will never vote for Clinton. 

Here is an emblematic example of the exact kind of voter she, or any Democrat, needs to win a general election, much less govern effectively. And that voter believes, based upon her first hand experience with the candidate, that Clinton cannot relate to her needs and her interests, and therefore won’t get her vote. Clinton is a fatally flawed candidate. I wish that all the party hacks who are circling the wagons around her would have the modicum of sense to realize this.

And who says Americans haven’t been sacrificing?