The Dish

Let’s air the arguments on the Dish, shall we? Instead of the horse-race crap in the MSM, let’s see if we can actually isolate what is truly at stake in choosing between these two candidates. I ran a pro-Clinton email last Saturday. Here’s a pro-Obama one:

There are two ways to win an election — present voters with simple arguments that they can accept or have a candidate that reassures them. I am worried that my candidate, Obama, is putting too much faith in the American voter and presenting them with the old academic Democratic arguments about the constitution. But my worry is balanced by the fact that he is the most trustworthy candidate and the American voter, especially those in the Midwest, have an excellent sense for honesty and trustworthiness.

Bill and Hillary have an apt understanding of the American voter; they know that the voters will reject these academic arguments about the constitution. Her challenge, though, is that she lacks the "character" that Barack naturally has. That is the difference between Barack and Hillary and why Republicans who tend to emphasize character are attracted to Barack.

One of the fundamental reasons I prefer Obama to Clinton is that he still seems like a human being. I’ve watched and listened to him as closely as I can these past few months and he still answers questions as if he genuinely wants to figure out the right answer. She reflexively gives the political response – without even pausing. Everything is calculated. Nothing is real – from her laugh to her finely honed policy positions, designed to attract as many micro-votes as her pollsters can detect. He can still actually weigh the balance between opportunism and idealism in politics; she has long since fused the two in her mind, so that anything that can win her power is, in her mind, good for the rest of us.

We cannot trust her. We can still trust him. He hasn’t been turned into the machine that national politics has turned her into. In the perilous days ahead, we desperately need a president again whom we can trust. He wins that argument. Which is why it is so vital for America that he win this contest against the increasingly ruthless Clinton machine.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

"The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiations of the Convention [Against Torture]. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today," – president Ronald Reagan, 1988.

Notice his clear stand not just against torture but also against "other inhuman treatment or punishment" as well. And now think what Bush and Cheney have done to the honor or reputation of the United States and the integrity of the conservative soul.

That was an encouraging story by David Kirkpatrick on the potential unraveling of the fusion of Christianism and the GOP. But I found the ramifications for the Democratic race interesting as well. The one person who could truly breathe life into the dry bones of Christianism is She Who Is Inevitable:

Many conservative Christian leaders say they can count on the specter of a second Clinton presidency to fire up their constituents. But the prospect of an Obama-Giuliani race is another matter. “You would have a bunch of people who traditionally vote Republican going over to Obama,” said the Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder of the Christian conservative American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., known for its consumer boycotts over obscenity or gay issues.

In the Wichita churches this summer, Obama was the Democrat who drew the most interest. Several mentioned that he had spoken at Warren’s Saddleback church and said they were intrigued.

It’s a dangerous path for Obama to fuse his politics with religion as well, of course. But Christianism that is not ideologically monolithic, while still troubling, is not as dangerous as the current one-party variety. Democrats need to grapple with this: if you worry about the Christianist right, Clinton is a big problem. She will do more to revive and unite the religious right than any Republican candidates can. Obama will be much more likely deflate and divide them.

Tony Blair poured millions into Britain’s socialized healthcare system, pumping unprecedented resources into a healthcare system that Michael Moore admires and the American left loves. This is the result:

More than 70,000 Britons will have treatment abroad this year – a figure that is forecast to rise to almost 200,000 by the end of the decade. Patients needing major heart surgery, hip operations and cataracts are using the internet to book operations to be carried out thousands of miles away.

India is the most popular destination for surgery, followed by Hungary, Turkey, Germany, Malaysia, Poland and Spain. But dozens more countries are attracting custom. Research by the Treatment Abroad website shows that Britons have travelled to 112 foreign hospitals, based in 48 countries, to find safe, affordable treatment.

David Greenberg is absolutely right to see in Giuliani an approach to government as illiberal, as secretive and as dictatorial as Dick Cheney:

Beyond religious issues, a second conservative trait defined Giuliani’s tenure: his Cheney-esque appetite for executive power. In 1999, for example, he directed (without the City Council’s permission) the police to permanently confiscate the cars of people charged with drunken driving — even if the suspects were later acquitted.

Giuliani’s record on government secrecy, too, is hardly moderate. Liberals today routinely attack President Bush’s refusal to divulge information about his domestic wiretapping program and his 2001 executive order claiming the power to close presidential papers. But they rarely discuss an equally autocratic move that Giuliani made: cutting a deal with the city as he was leaving office to assign control of his mayoral records to his own private company so that he could decide who could see them.

The fanciful notion of Giuliani’s liberalism also omits the piece de resistance of his mayorship: his flagrantly undemocratic bid to stay in office for an extra three months after Sept. 11, 2001. During earlier crises, even World War II, U.S. elections had always managed to proceed normally. But Giuliani maneuvered for weeks to remain mayor after his term-limited exit date. Only as normalcy returned to New York did his power grab fail.

One of the most fundamental questions of the next election is whether the American people are going to endorse the protectorate of extreme executive power that Cheney and Bush have constructed: an executive empowered to over-rule the rule of law, issue signing statements declaring itself the superme branch of government, to detain any person at will, torture at will, and wage war at will, without Congressional approval, and to do all this on a permanent – not temporary, emergency – basis. With Giuliani, you have one more dictatorial impulse: to refuse to submit even to an election if he deems the crisis too great. Any rule-of-law conservative who believes that liberty is best secured when power is divided knows whom not vote for.

(Photo: Nicholas Roberts/AFP/Getty.)

"What is freedom for a conservative? It rests, as Hobbes intuited, on being secure in one’s own physical existence; and in accepting the fact that others exist who are just as human as we are, and, in political life, deserve equal treatment under the law. Then what?

The conservative will answer: everything. The great and constant dream of the conservative is to be left alone by his own government and by his fellow humans, as much as is possible. Left alone, there is so much to explore, to do, to experience, to live and breathe and think. Life is such a mystery it demands to be taken as it is and at the same time explored further. It constantly throws us questions to which the answers are opaque and yet always inviting. Any impediment to exploring this life as fully and as intrepidly as we can is anathema to a conservative. It robs him of that thrill of being human, of that moment to be felt and experienced now, of feeling and thought and serendipity and contingency. These contingent, mysterious things are what make us human; and freedom is the means by which we live most fully as human beings.

The intervention of a government is like that of a loud telephone ringing in the middle of an engrossing dinner conversation. It is inherently offensive. It commands our attention, when we would much rather be doing something else," – The Conservative Soul, Chapter Six, now out in paperback.

A child eats lunch at an aid station for homeless people on October 27, 2007 in Chongqing Municipality, China. By China Photos/Getty Images.

It’s extremely gratifying that two centrist, non-leftist Senators have produced one of the more far-reaching climate change bills in the Congress. Grist has the background on the debate within the green activist community between pragmatism and growing urgency.

A riveting IHT interview with

one of the main organizers of the September protest marches in Myanmar, Ashin Kovida, a 24-year-old Buddhist monk, who escaped to Thailand last week by carrying a false identification card, dying his hair blond and wearing a crucifix.

The failed revolution was organized by a handful of monks in their twenties. Kovida escaped. Others are missing or in hiding.

Heh: