The Dish

Sometimes the strangest people use the worst slang.

A milestone of sorts. Pray for his soul and his family and his readers.

An incident in a Belgrade zoo. Beer and bears don’t mix too well – unless you’re talking about chubby gays.

My beloved candidate has just won an Alabama straw poll, although almost no one showed up and Alan Keyes won last time. But the liberals are onto him. The American Prospect is unimpressed. Today, however, is Ron Paul’s birthday – and Reason has a great line-up of pieces about him and his campaign.

Here I am on the Charlie Rose show over a decade ago. A reader told me of the link. Man, I’ve aged. Weird to hear me speaking of marriage as the central issue for gay rights twelve years ago. Before we really thought it would ever happen.

Noam Scheiber parses yesterday’s Chris Wallace interview.

It’s a brutal and difficult topic, but this essay stands out for its candor. It’s from the wonderful blog, 3 Quarks Daily, a Dish fave. Money quote:

It was not so long ago that Jesse Helms, or perhaps Strom Thurmond, described Jean-Bertrand Aristide as a confirmed ‘psychotic’ when he learned of the Haitian president’s Prozac prescription.  My fellow philosophy professors thoughtlessly invoke ‘happiness pills’ as the easy way out for the philosophically lazy, while the general public seems to perceive antidepressants as a crutch for the frivolous, as a Hollywood indulgence, as a symptom of privileged frailty.  This moralistic condemnation is usually counterbalanced only be the equally unsubtle medicalistic reduction of our emotional lives to chemical imbalances.  I am neither crazy, nor lazy, nor is my state entirely explicable in terms of a certain disequilibrium of fluids.  I am a depressive, which is to say a person who experiences the world in a certain way.  Now I am every bit as materialist as the cynical doctors who paid for that billboard, yet I dare say that when I talk about my depression what I am talking about is nothing other than my ‘character’.

Forget about abortion. Ask the Republicans about the morning after pill, stem-cell research and family planning.

If he had taken Jim Fallows’ advice. Always take a parachute.

The current Republicans could learn from another one, Dwight Eisenhower:

Trying to hold a country the size of Iraq in the middle of a civil war with 160,000 troops would have seemed to him absurd. If you need to use force, you should have enough of it to do the job quickly and completely. Then get the troops home and leave the rest to the politicians and diplomats. That was the American way of war, as Ike and Grant saw it.

Ike was shrewd enough to avoid getting entangled in France’s war in Indochina. "No one," he said, "could be more opposed to ever getting the United States involved in a hot war in that region than I am." As for the Middle East, Ike offered prescient words: the United States had no business transforming itself into "an occupying power in a seething Arab world," and if it ever did so, "I am sure we would regret it."