The Dish

Move over, Chris Richardson Blake Lewis. France’s Pop Idol has a beat box star:

I’m with Jonah on this, which may disconcert him. I think conservatism is indeed linked to resistance to change at a deep level. But at a deeper one, it also accepts change as an integral part of human organization and society. What distinguishes conservatives in the sense I prefer from liberals is a residual respect for what has been, a desire to understand it before changing it. But change it conservatives will. Think of the conservative game-changers in the past: Lincoln, Disraeli, Thatcher, Reagan. They key is the mechanism for change – whether it springs from the experiential intimations of the past and present or from the abstract certainty of the rational mind. The former is conservative; the latter liberal. The genius of the West has been that both tendencies are part of its DNA; and both are necessary. Prudence alone can tell us when to apply which. Which is a key conservative insight as well. This is all developed at some length in The Conservative Soul, which, alas, Jonah declared no conservatives would read. Maybe at some point, some will.

A reader writes:

I mostly agree with your musing about Iran perhaps being the target of our disaster in Iraq. I believe that Iran was the real target of the Bush-Cheney administration all along. Iraq was just a very good excuse. I believe they were looking toward Iran as soon as, or before,  Bush announced "Mission Accomplished" on the aircraft carrier. To me there can be no other explanation for the disastrous way they began the occupation.

Cheney expected to put Chalabi in place, build a few bases to make it look like we were going to protect democracy and then fire up the propaganda machine for the invasion of Iran. They had the forces in place, the supply routes and ports in Kuwait, and a ready and eager public to support them. Unfortunately, they didn’t plan on the insurgency. The result is the situation we are in now.

I can think of no other explanation for their "incompetence". These are not dumb people. (With one obvious exception.) They believe there is no limit to their power, that the world, and in particular the oil rich Middle East, needs to be  controlled, and from Cheney’s point of view we need to teach the mullahs a lesson after the hostage crisis in 1979. The man has a long memory and doesn’t fail to act.

I predict that once the surge is approved and the additional money is appropriated you will see an increase in the rhetoric about Iran. Bush and Cheney had a 7 year time frame to deal with Iran after 9/11. The mess in Iraq has slowed them down, but hasn’t stopped the war drums. I think Bush still holds out hope that a neo-conservative Republican (is there anything else nowadays) will be elected in 2008. Whoever that may be is likely to find Iraq the least of their problems. The disaster in Iran will keep them more than occupied.

Remember, Bush and Cheney have never worried about accountability. It doesn’t matter to them that someone else will have to clean up after them. If there is a chance to make a profit for their friends, demonstrate how "tough" they are, and show the world that you don’t mess with America, while extending democracy, they will take it.

I’m not sure it was all that closely worked out in advance. But it may be Cheney’s best improvisation after the success of the Iraq insurgency, especially if Bush can now tie that insurgency to Iran (after the link to al Qaeda has done the work required by it at home).

A reader writes:

You think you’re having a bad day?  On the anniversary of 9/11 you have the audacity to vent about how tough your day is? Yes, life goes on, but have some sense of time and place. Shame on you!

Sigh. I was writing what I hope was an obviously not-too-serious post about the petty vicissitudes of daily life on September 10. If you think that means I don’t care about the victims on 9/11, I guess I’m not going to persuade you now, am I?

And England will endure – despite the evil bureaucrats in Brussels, who never saw a tradition they didn’t want to streamline.

A revealing quote from Kevin Drum, back in February 2002:

"No one ever pressed LBJ for proof of what happened in the Tonkin Gulf, but there will be dozens of countries and dozens more NGOs who will be looking very closely at what we find in Iraq after ground forces move in. It will hardly be possible to fake vast numbers of mobile weapons labs, swimming pools of anthrax, ballistic missiles, and the like, and if those things aren’t found in substantial and convincing quantities George Bush will be lucky to escape impeachment, let alone win reelection."

And yet he won re-election; and the Demcrats are still deferring to him on the war. In the end, shamelessness defeated accountability.

Not that different from us, apparently:

When trying to understand someone’s intentions, non-human primates expect others to act rationally by performing the most appropriate action allowed by the environment, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard University.

The findings appear in the Sept. 7, 2007 issue of the journal of Science. The work was led by Justin Wood, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, with David Glynn, a research assistant, and Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard, along with Brenda Phillips of Boston University.

"A dominant view has been that non-human primates attend only to what actions look like when trying to understand what others are thinking," says Wood. "In contrast, our research shows that non-human primates infer others’ intentions in a much more sophisticated way. They expect other individuals to perform the most rational action that they can, given the environmental obstacles that they face."

But our kids still beat theirs’.

(Photo: Peter MacDiarmid/Getty.)

"Mitt Romney will do anything, say anything, smear any opponent and flip flop on any position in order to win," – Todd Harris, spokesman for Fred Thompson, after Romney’s "half-baked cover-up" of an alleged surrogate’s hit-job on the Tennesseean. Hold your gold, girls.

It has to do with sex and competition, apparently. They don’t have an itch.

A revealing exchange:

During the Q&A round at the armed services committee, Senator John Warner, the Virginia Republican … asked Petraeus a pointed question:

"Do you feel that [Iraq war] is making America safer"?

Petraeus paused before responding. He then said:

"I believe this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq."

That was, of course, a non-answer. And Warner wasn’t going to let the general dodge the bullet. He repeated the question:

"Does the [Iraq war] make America safer?"

Petraeus replied, "I don’t know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind."

He’s fighting a war that he hasn’t even decided is vital or even beneficial to the security of the United States. That’s how lost we are in mission creep. That’s the depth of the hole in which Petraeus has been ordered to keep digging.