The Dish

Arch-conservative Bruce Fein, who’s been on a tear:

Chastened by his time as chief of staff in a weakened White House under President Gerald Ford after Watergate, Mr Cheney has endeavoured to aggrandise the executive at the expense of Congress and the judiciary. He has urged the people to trust the Cheney-Bush duumvirate to act wisely and benevolently.

But what about the Iraqi quagmire; Abu Ghraib; the National Security Agency’s unrestricted spying on Americans in contravention of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; the detention of citizens and non-citizens as enemy combatants on the president’s say-so alone; claiming the US as a battlefield where lethal military force can be employed to kill or maim al-Qaeda suspects; playing judge, jury and prosecutor and using secret evidence in the trials of war crimes; creating a secretive government shielded from legal or political accountability by the invocation of executive privilege or state secrets; and secretly kidnapping and imprisoning terrorist suspects abroad? To justify these misadventures and excesses, the vice-president has vastly inflated the dangers of international terrorism.

New, disturbing evidence. More here.

The growing clash between the media elite and the media insurgents is well illustrated by this blog-spat between Glenn Greenwald and Joe Klein. I take all of Glenn’s points. At the same time, I know of few reporters who do as much work with, say, military sources as Joe. He was the first to tell me in the summer of 2003 that the Iraq invasion was doomed. He has been consistently attuned to military strategy since. He may have centrist biases, but if Joe Klein is what is wrong with Washington journalism, we’re in not so bad a state.

On the deeper point, however, I think Glenn is right. One of my own errors before the war was a function of being steeped in Washington policy debates – and neo-conservative arguments – for years. I had been so conditioned to suspect Iraq after 9/11 that my skepticism deserted me. I mentioned Saddam on September 12. The result was that the prelude to the Iraq war was far too easily framed by the information and biases of the Beltway elite, the Pentagon establishment, and the neocon brain-trust. Worse, we were unspeakably condescending to those on the outside who were right. We trusted far too much, and people much further away from the levers of power saw more clearly than we did. I don’t think Joe was the worst offender in this camp, which is why I find the focus on him strange. But he wasn’t immune, and neither was I.  In so far as the blogosphere has opened up this stifling cartel of received wisdom, it is all for the better.

But this story isn’t over, I suspect. And the ramifications of Iraq may well be wider than we currently realize. The questions raised by the mess in Mesopotamia are deeper than many in Washington are prepared to admit. Beltway boundaries can enforce a rote reflexiveness, a cramped conventionality on certain subjects. So few in the Beltway support total evacuation from Iraq. But many, many Americans do. And it is a predictable Beltway meme that Clinton did better than Obama this week because she showed "experience" and he showed "naivete". But I wonder if that’s the case. I wonder if the country hasn’t shifted sufficiently to make total disengagement from Iraq thinkable and Clinton seem a captive of past presumptions about American power and how it should be wielded. Iraq has made the case for a "humble nation" more eloquently than Bush in 2000 ever could.

Something is stirring out there – as the Obama and Paul candidacies show. The polls show record levels of discontent. The logic for permanent engagement in the Middle East is far less cogent than it was only a year ago. And the capacity of Americans to throw their own elites overboard will be tested in the next two years.

I do not know where this is headed. A new isolationism? A new liberal hegemony? More of the same? But I have a feeling that those of us in the Beltway may be among the last to see it coming.

There’s another brutally cynical and anti-Russian blogger out there. Check out this post. For a more sober analysis, brought to my attention by a Russophile reader, this Foreign Affairs article is worth a read.

A reader writes:

You asked:  "Remind me why any Democrat would back Clinton?" Let’s see if I, as a level-headed Midwestern, former-Reagan Republican, current Democrat can jog your memory:

1968 – Humphrey 1972 – McGovern 1976 – Carter 1980 – Carter 1984 – Mondale 1988 – DUKAKIS

These are the people this party nominates. Much like the current Republicans who so alienate the majority of their conservative supporters by pandering to the base of the party, the Democrats don’t view the big picture realistically.  Rather than court the independent voter who is sick of the partisan pandering, they focus on the enemy before them and attack, pretending that independents don’t exist. 

As you’ve noted recently, many of your Republican/conservative brothers and sisters are tired of the "party above all else, save Jesus" crowd.  They’re thirsty for a viable alternative, and will go so far as to actually listen to HRC rather than dismiss her as a matter of course.  Despite this incredible opportunity to court independents so disgusted by Bush/Cheney/Rove, as well as to poach a large number of Republicans who are likewise disenfranchised, the Democrats will make the same mistake they always do.

They will go with the party loyalist, and that candidate who most pushes the far left agenda.  Regardless of this nascent appeal of Hillary, her negative numbers across the broader spectrum are still through the roof, especially when compared with the negatives of anyone else in the race on either side. 

The Democratic Convention will ignore the moderates in their own party, and the independents anxiously awaiting Bush’s ride off into the sunset.  The Democrats will nominate Hilary, when Obama has shown in poll after poll that he is electable due to his broad appeal among moderates and independents.  Unless this party recognizes the need to be the party of change as it did in 1992, or gets a viable third party candidate to run and pull votes from voters who would otherwise vote Republican (in the vein of Ross Perot in 1992) HRC will be join the list above.

Ross:

There have always been two critical camps on the Harry Potter phenomenon – the small band of haters, which includes Harold Bloom, A.S. Byatt, and lesser lights like Ron Charles, and the host of apologists, which includes more or less everybody else… Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I’m sorry to say, is grist for the haters.

New York, New York, 8 pm.

For a newly updated, global gallery of Dish readers’ window views, click here.

A blog devoted to all things anti-Putin. Lost of translations from the Russian-language press. Worth checking out.

Well, I trawled through the various knuckle-dragging websites and there’s still no actual, you know, evidence that he fabricated anything. Maybe he did. First-person war-stories are always hard to verify beyond a shadow of a doubt, no? But if Malkin can’t dredge up something and fling it by now, no one can. Unhinged bigot Ace tries dredging through others’ private lives again. When in doubt, aim for the girlfriend. To reiterate: I cannot know if everything in the various Baghdad Diarists checks out. But I cannot know that about any number of pieces I read every day. I’m also a proud alumn of TNR. But it seems to me people should make actual allegations of factual inaccuracy or refrain from smears. Call me crazy.

Oh, and, by the way, the attorney-general has clearly been fingered for perjury by the evidence of the FBI director. Here appears to be a proven untruth under oath by the attorney-general. Now do you have an idea why the entire right-wing blogosphere is frothing at the mouth about a story whose primary controversial fact has actually checked out?

The Thompson campaign has had its first mini-implosion before it has even started. The wife is the problem, it appears. Ambers puts as good a spin on it as he can:

Thompson unwisely allowed tension to develop between his wife and the rest of the campaign staff. Ex-campaign-manager designate Tom Collamore did not mesh with Jeri Thompson and the friction between the two was evident to the rest of the staff. At times, Kehn Thompson would simply countermand Collamore’s instructions. She has final hiring authority — something that every campaign manager needs and Collamore never had. The Thompson presidential staff will be her staff more than Fred’s.

J.T. Mastranadi is one of the Republican Party’s best opposition researchers. His "ground" skill — his ability to unearth new information — is the envy of many competitors. He was hired two weeks ago, and when he began to plan for the campaign, he found it difficult to get his questions answered. He quickly concluded that Thompson had yet to get his affairs in order, friends say.

And time is running out.

(Photo: Evan Agostini/Getty.)