The Dish

It’s a risky one, but, in my view, a better strategy than the alternative. From my Sunday column:

In a polarized climate, where Rudy Giuliani is already lambasting Hillary and itching for a fight, Obama is sticking to a disciplined message of reconciliation, unity, responsibility.

Is this a mistake? Whoever won a Democratic primary by insisting on being open to Republicans? That is the risk Obama is taking. But when you observe and listen closely, you see this is what he actually means.

He detects an enormous weariness among Americans about their internal divisions in a time of war, overlaid by the anger and divisions that have deepened and widened under the Bush presidency. He suspects that if he can get past Clinton’s aura of inevitability, Democrats will realise he has a much better chance of winning a real national majority in the general election than Clinton does. Clinton polarises the way Bush polarises. She can hope for a Karl Rove-style 51% majority in a deeply divided country. He’s aiming for 55%.

Clinton, in other words, represents payback for the Democrats and liberals after the Bush era, just as Giuliani is emerging as the inheritor of the Bush legacy of divide and rule. Right now, Obama remains to the side, offering Americans something else: not payback, but a new page.

The rest here.

(Photo: Obama at the SEIU confab. By Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty.)

A reader writes:

With respect to your post on the NYT and Moveon, it isn’t being mentioned as much that Hoyt said the paper similarly mistakenly undercharged Giuliani for his ad responding to the MoveOn ad:

"Hoyt noted, however, that the executive who approved the ad did not view it as a personal attack. Rudy Giuliani, a leading GOP presidential candidate and former New York mayor, received the same rate for a response ad he placed days later, Hoyt wrote."

As for whether the MoveOn ad was a "personal attack":

"The executive who approved the ad, Hoyt wrote, said the ad was ‘rough’ but that ‘he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.’"

A letter-writer in Iowa has a suggestion:

For all that some Christian Republicans claim Christ as one of their own, it’s far more likely that he would vote Libertarian. Treat people with fairness and love; otherwise leave them alone.

Sorry: not buying it. Jesus has no politics. He has a message of individual salvation. No political system is necessary for it; none can ultimately prevent it.

Ron Paul beats Rudy Giuliani in the Michigan straw-poll.

This has not made the mainstream yet (unless you count NPod) – but it is about to be wheeled out. It’s an argument that concedes that the Iraq war thus far has been a disaster – but that it can be rescued by a missile attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Imagine how the president would respond to this line of argument. Now imagine it coming, as it will, from Cheney:

All the damaging consequences of all the blunders the President has committed to date in Iraq are reversible in 48 to 72 hours – the time it will take to destroy Iran’s fragile nuclear supply chain from the air. And since the job gets done using mostly stand-off weapons and stealth bombers, not one American soldier, sailor or airman need suffer as much as a bruised foot. Let’s look downstream the day after and observe how the world has changed. First and foremost, there’s this prospective  fait accompli — and it changes everything. The Iranians are no longer a nuclear threat, and won’t be again for at least another decade,  and even that assumes the strategic and diplomatic situation reverts to the status quo ante and they’ll just be able to pick up and rebuild as they would after an earthquake. Not possible.

Next, the Iranians would do nothing — bupkes.

They don’t attack Israel, they don’t choke off the world’s oil supply, they do not send hit squads to the United States, there is no "war" in the conventional sense of attack counterattack. Iran already has its hands full without inviting more trouble. Its leaders would be reeling from the initial US attack and they would know our forces are in position to strike again if Iran provokes us or our allies. They would stand before mankind with their pants around their ankles, dazed, bleeding, crying, reduced to bloviating from mosques in Teheran and pounding their fists on desks at the UN. The lifelines they throw to the Iraqi insurgents, Hezbollah and Syria would begin to dry up, as would the lifelines the double-dealing Europeans have been throwing to Iran. Maybe the Mullahs would lose control.

I suspect that every word of the last paragraph should be taken with the same level of seriousness as the notion in 2003 that there would never be an insurgency in Iraq.

The stories were too good to be true. It turns out that Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia on the Brady Bunch, did not, in fact, have a lesbian affair during the taping of the series with Jan, younger sister. Her memoir will not include the steamy details because they never happened. Apologies to straight post-boomer guys everywhere.

Port St Lucie, Florida, 6.54 pm.

The results of the Best Movie Line Ever contest are here.

And self-inflicted:

Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse?

The answer to the first question is that MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.

The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, "We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature." Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, said that, while it was "rough," he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.

That’s the NYT’s own version. Here’s the Daily News. At best, incompetence; at worst, bias. Either way, if the NYT wants to recover, it needs to fire someone. I’m not of the view that this ad was in any way as important as the debate about future strategy in Iraq. But because it distracted us from that, it was a lose-lose proposition. I’m a skeptic of the surge and worried about the use of Petraeus for political purposes. The ad still repelled me.

The extremes on both sides are culpable in this respect. Coulter and MoveOn deserve each other. If you can’t condemn the one, you have no business condemning the other. And the rest of us deserve a lot better.

If you’re not informed about this organization, you should be. The Weekly Standard has a helpful primer. Money quote:

How worried should the West be about the expansion of this not directly violent group, yet whose alumni include al Qaeda’s notorious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Musab al Zarqawi? Very worried, argues Maajid Nawaz, a former leader and recruiter for HT in Britain, the organization’s headquarters. As Nawaz explained this month to the New York Times, "Hizb ut-Tahrir spearheaded the radicalization of the 1990s and cultivated an atmosphere of anger. . . . Buried in the literature is an ideology that inevitably leads to violence." Hudson Institute scholar Zeyno Baran put it best: "While HT as an organization does not engage in terrorist activities, it has become the vanguard of the radical Islamist ideology that encourages its followers to commit terrorist acts. . . . HT today serves as a de facto conveyor belt for terrorists."

Here’s a propaganda YouTube made by HT cited in the article. It’s long and full of untruth: