The Dish

The Best Blog of the Year … PostSecret.com. Where you can read anonymous gems like this:

Not that I’m bitter or anything. Thanks to those who voted for the Dish.

The religious evolution of Tony Blair.

A real feminist vs a phony one. Peggy Noonan explains:

The point is the big ones, the real ones, the Thatchers and Indira Gandhis and Golda Meirs and Angela Merkels, never play the boo-hoo game. They are what they are, but they don’t use what they are. They don’t hold up their sex as a feint: Why, he’s not criticizing me, he’s criticizing all women! Let us rise and fight the sexist cur.

Liz Mair echoes the argument. One reason I cannot stand Hillary Clinton is that I’m a feminist.

Rex Wockner expresses something that the gay activist elite too often refuses to engage:

I’ve been sitting here sort of picking my own brain and asking myself if gay and trans people do in fact have some crucial thing in common. I’ve read tons of opinion pieces and blog posts on the ENDA war in recent weeks, but none of them really opened my eyes. What do I have in common with a guy who wants to remove his willy, grow breasts, become a woman and get married to a man? From where did this relatively new concept of "the LGBT community" come?

The Croatian-sounding acronym only makes sense from the perspective of the pomo-left, whose control of the major gay groups allows them to dictate what is and what is not kosher for gay people. I support enthusiastically the right of transgender people to live their lives as they wish and to be free from government discrimination. But that question is logically separate from gay rights, and always has been. Many transgender people are heterosexual; most gay people have no internal conflict with their own gender. It remains important to insist that, just because so many in the gay world have been browbeaten into repeating the concept of an "LGBT community", that doesn’t mean it exists. I don’t really believe there is even a "gay and lesbian community" as such. There are common interests in violating heterosexual norms, but the experience of being a gay man and being a lesbian are often experientially more different than the contrast between many straight women and lesbians or between many straight men and gay men. Gender is often a more powerful identifier than orientation.

Political coalitions are fine and necessary. But when they lead to complete distortion of reality – as in the absurd notion of an LGBT "community" –  they are misleading. Many professional "LGBT" activists are so marinated in far-left ideology they do not even see this. That’s why I don’t use the term LGBT. It’s crude and dumb and as ideologically loaded as the previous attempts by the left to coopt language, like "queer."

From lame strike slogans to a new, sassy YouTube:

Barack Obama put it gently, with respect to Bill Clinton’s increasing role in trying to ensure that he gets his wife (and himself) back into the White House:

"My understanding is President Clinton’s not on the ballot."

The problem is: he is and he isn’t. His wife wants to use him as a weapon in the campaign, but still insist that it is she who is running, and not him. She wants to appeal to a return to his policies, but still insists that she does not represent a third term for the 42d president. She wants him on her resume until it’s not convenient. Then she pretends to be a feminist. She wants to include in her "experience" her attempt to get everybody’s healthcare under her beatifically benign control in the early 1990s. But in turn he insists that her failure to achieve anything – because of her reflexive secrecy, paranoia and over-reach – was actually his fault, not hers. She wants credit for being a feminist, while still running in part on her husband’s record – both claiming credit for the good parts and disowning the bad parts. They will keep playing this game – arguing every which way, passing the buck from one to the other, never accepting responsibility, for as long as it gets them past the latest news cycle.

If she is the nominee, it will be the two of them again. The real risk is that it will mean the same never-ending psycho-drama, the same petty sleaze, the same constant beat of marital-political intrigue that we endured in the 1990s. It’s worth recalling: just because their enemies were often vile doesn’t mean the Clintons didn’t give them plenty to work with – often needlessly. Another term of the two of them could well lead to the same kind of sexual scandals that distracted and near-paralyzed affairs of state in the 1990s. If you don’t believe that, then you simply haven’t grasped the depth of Bill Clinton’s needs and compulsions and Hillary Clinton’s life-long enabling of them. Their act in power could in turn provoke the same response from the hard right – empowering the Christianists just as they are finally being marginalized, funding them, uniting re-energizing them, rebuilding the GOP around social conservatism and war. I am told by my Clinton-friendly readers that I am obsessed with this matter, seized with hatred, a mouthpiece for Republican talking points, a woman-hater, etc etc. Fine. Whatever. Have your say.

But if you think we would be electing a normal presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton, as opposed to a co-dependent, scandal-drawn power-couple with almost no accountability within their marriage, let alone outside it, then you’re welcome to your delusions.

I just want this on the record, ok? If you want to pick them again, do so with your eyes open.

(Photo: Mario Tama/Getty.)

Beijing, China, 4.30 pm.

Yes: we are not water-boarding enough!

The Oregon court heard oral arguments yesterday on a ground-breaking circumcision case:

The case pits divorced parents named James and Lia Boldt against each other. The father, a lawyer, recently converted to Judaism and wants to circumcise his 12-year-old son, over whom he has full custody. The mother doesn’t want the circumcision to take place. It’s not clear what the kid wants. The lower court dismissed the wife’s challenge, and she’s appealing the decision.

Yesterday, the mother’s attorney Clay Patrick — a self described “lawyer’s lawyer” — told the court that the circumcision posed “an unreasonable and unnecessarily high risk to the child.” Patrick said that even though the father had full custody, the mother was entitled to a court hearing because the procedure amounts to “sex abuse or physical abuse.” He said to the judges: “If the custodial parent wanted to amputate some other body part, I think the court would step in and say you can’t do that.”

There are some religious freedom arguments involved – if religious freedom means subjecting a twelve-year-old to permanent bodily mutilation. The father says he can do anything he wants to his son’s body, barring something like tattooing "a swastika on his forehead." Here’s the NYSun coverage. Weird sub-plot:

The anti-circumcision brief notes that during a prior court proceeding unrelated to the circumcision issue, the Boldts agreed that they had a dominant-submissive relationship — in which Mr. Boldt was "god" or "sovereign" — and that sometimes involved Mr. Boldt administering beatings to his wife, who assumed the role of "slave girl." The Boldts’ son "must not be abandoned by the courts, to become embroiled in his father’s need for a replacement slave … if that is what happened," the anti-circumcision group argued.

A reader writes:

I’d like to add to your argument on the mental side of torture another note from the history of legal torture. During the century or so of torture authorized by royal warrants in England, the administration of the technique came in two steps. First, the prisoner would be shown the implements of torture, to see if the horror of the thought of the pain his body would suffer on those devices would induce a confession.  If that psychological coercion failed, the next step was to begin the actual process of imposing physical pain on the prisoner. Both steps were included in the instructions within torture warrants. Thus, in 1642, when the apprentice glover John Archer was to be put to torture to gain information about a riot outside the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace at Lambeth, he was first given time to stare at the rack — and only if he remained silent, according to the warrant, the last to be issued in England, was he to be bound onto the machine.

Such mental torture was genuinely coercive as well — though it did not persuade the luckless Archer to betray any of his fellow rioters.

Perhaps most famously, during Galileo’s trial before the Holy Office (the Inquisition) for the heresy of proclaiming Copernicus to be correct came to a climax when the old man was shown the implements of torture available to his prosecutors. Finally convinced that he stood in real jeopardy, the frightened old man recanted without the need for any inquisitor to put metal to flesh.

Fear of pain and the terror of plausibly imminent death, have been recognized as elements of torture for a very long time, not to mention the fact — frequently restated by you — that such coercion is plainly illegal under US law and the UCMJ.  Those who deny the obvious are, bluntly, teaching themselves to unknow what they know; they are wounding themselves, amputating their own capacity to reason.

Amputating the capacity to reason is the first recourse of fundamentalists and fascists. They both crave the unknowingness of submission to pure authority.