The Dish

A reader writes:

Vanity Fair’s piece on Judith Giuliani, which doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t read in New York a couple of weeks ago, still stimulates the following thought: she’s twice-divorced, she lived with a man for four years, sharing his one-bedroom apartment with him and her adopted daughter, she basically propositioned Giuliani while he was still married to his second wife, and then conducted an adulterous affair with him. I’m guessing, all of these are firsts for a Republican first lady (Bill & Hillary were shacked up for awhile before marriage, one assumes).

But nobody, and I mean nobody, on the Republican side seems to have a problem with this. Are these the same folks who passed the "Defense of Marriage Act"?

Well: DOMA wasn’t actually about marriage, was it?

"He’s a very engaging person… I’d like to see him as president. Can you imagine him at the United Nations?" – Bob Novak on Ron Paul.

He will not be Dukakized. And his emphasis in his major foreign policy speech today homes in on a key Bush-Cheney failing: al Qaeda in Pakistan. This is something a Republican should be comfortable saying:

"I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will."

Outflanking Bush-Cheney with a serious, aggressive, intelligent campaign against Islamist terror? It’s what the country wants. And it seems to be what Obama is offering. He manages to decouple the war in Iraq from the broader war on Islamist terror thus:

"Just because the President misrepresents our enemies does not mean we do not have them. The terrorists are at war with us. The threat is from violent extremists who are a small minority of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, but the threat is real. They distort Islam. They kill man, woman and child; Christian and Hindu, Jew and Muslim. They seek to create a repressive caliphate. To defeat this enemy, we must understand who we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for…

The President would have us believe that every bomb in Baghdad is part of al Qaeda’s war against us, not an Iraqi civil war. He elevates al Qaeda in Iraq – which didn’t exist before our invasion – and overlooks the people who hit us on 9/11, who are training new recruits in Pakistan. He lumps together groups with very different goals: al Qaeda and Iran, Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents. He confuses our mission…

By refusing to end the war in Iraq, President Bush is giving the terrorists what they really want, and what the Congress voted to give them in 2002: a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

When I am President, we will wage the war that has to be won, with a comprehensive strategy with five elements: getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan; developing the capabilities and partnerships we need to take out the terrorists and the world’s most deadly weapons; engaging the world to dry up support for terror and extremism; restoring our values; and securing a more resilient homeland."

This is the speech of a potential president.

(Photo: Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty.)

A parody, I’d say. Here’s his MySpace profile:

I am a very healthy, intelligent man with a vigor for Christ, art, gospel music, opera, travel, gourmet cooking, interior design, reading, shopping, and spending times with my family and friends. As a heterosexual I enjoy spending time with my lady friend, Karen, who I have known since Jr. high school. Sorry, Ladies, I am not looking for a romantic encounter. Friends from both genders are always welcome. I enjoy working out in the gym, wrestling, and broadway shows. I own a Interior Design firm with my best friend, Gary, who I met in college. I am very active in my church, Creationism activism, the Pro-Life movement, and serve alongside Gary as co-founder of the Metro-Atlanta Geocentric Bible Study Group.

I guess it says something either about me or about the Brownback campaign, but I remain unsure if this site is a parody or not. Here’s a new blog-post from BaptistsforBrownback2008:

"It is written in Rev 20:8-Satan shall go out to deceive all the nations which are in the four quarters of the Earth, Gog,and Magog to gather them together to battle: The number of whom is countless and of the sand of the sea or shores of the sea.  As descendant of Canaan, Liberal Democrat, Barack Obama Hussein is indeed a liar for that there is no disputing. He has and will continue to with his lies to God’s children that abortion, blatant homosexuality, fornication, and socialism is fun and good. This does not however make him the great liar that God tells us is to be the Anti-Christ. It is Barack Hussein Obama’s curse of coloredness that will prevent him from ever being elected leader of a true Christian nation, one that is founded upon Christian principle by the chosen, fair-skinned people of God."

You tell me. I’m leaning toward parody. But it’s a lot of work if it is.

I missed this radio commentary. Its glib know-nothingness is worth putting on the table.

"Well, the world needs ditch-diggers too." "Caddyshack."

A reader writes:

Re: your complaints about the publishing industry. I’ve worked in publishing for more than 25 years. I’ve done a little bit of everything, from copyediting, to acquisitions work, to typesetting, to book design, to software development. (OK, so it’s not your normal career path.)

In my last job, the production editors were instructed never to let me see a new book – I had a nasty habit of finding an error within the first few seconds of handling a copy.

But the problem is that good copy-editing is expensive — at least, as modern accounting rules in publishing count expense. Everyone knows that publishing books is not like manufacturing widgets, but it’s the widget model that prevails among the bean counters.

And then there’s the current American education system. How many people notice flaws in other people’s prose (much less their own)? I do, and I’d hazard a guess that most readers of your blog can (and maybe even some of the writers!), but we make a small minority of the reading public. So, why should a rational businessman worry about such a minor issue as prose quality when hardly anyone cares?

Finally, I must say that many of those who do care work in the lower echelons of the publishing business, and publishers like Talese rely upon — or take advantage of — their devotion to the printed word. But their number is diminishing, and current college graduates lack both the skills and the will to carry on the tradition, especially at the salaries being offered.

Soon, print-on-demand may put the publishing houses out of business. It can’t happen soon enough. The first print-run of my last book was published with an indeterminate number of copies with the pages in the wrong order. I was the only person who noticed. No one at Harper Collins or the printer was able to tell me how many books had been misprinted, or shipped with misprints. They had no idea; and no way to find out.

"Huckabee is an evangelical. He has not learned how to speak to evangelicals; i.e. Bush 41 & 43. He is one of us. I know Senator Brownback converted to Roman Catholicism in 2002. Frankly, as a recovering Catholic myself, that is all I need to know about his discernment when compared to the Governor’s. I don’t if this fact is widely known among evangelicals who are supporting Brownback," – Rev. Tim Rude, a pastor at the Walnut Creek Community Church in Windsor Heights, Iowa, in an email to Iowa evangelicals.

Another recut trailer from YouTube heaven: