The Dish

A National Interest interview with Rosemary Hollis, director of research at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs). The British report on Iraq was just released last Saturday. It is as bleak as the US intelligence community’s. Money quote:

Well, I was in Iran just over a month ago, and I interviewed a number of people in and around the administration. The future of Iraq belongs to them. They believe they’re winning in Iraq and that America is losing, and it’s just a question of how soon the Americans give up and go home, or whether they will hold on. Now if they hold on, one must assume that part of the reason is to deny a victory to the Iranians, but how do you justify that to the soldiers on the ground? That it’s no longer about putting things right in Iraq? It’s about salvaging America’s reputation vis-à-vis Iran?

This Bill O’Reilly segment is interesting. He simply asserts that gay binational couples are more likely to be fraudulent than straight couples. What evidence does he have for this? None. Gay immigration advocates back exactly the same standards of proof and evidence of serious relationships for gay couples as straight ones. And most fraudulent would-be immigrants are far more reluctant to self-identify as gay than as straight. For good measure, some binational gay couples are also legally married in America, in Massachusetts. But their/my marriage license is regarded as toilet paper by the federal government. You can see the brick wall that Rachel Tiven’s arguments receive from O’Reilly. That brick wall is called homophobia, an assumption that gay relationships are worth less and mean less than straight ones. It’s so deep I doubt O’Reilly is even aware of it.

I linked to Patrick Ruffini’s panicked fear that Ron Paul may do very well in the Ames, Iowa straw poll. Among the reasons Patrick cited for Paul’s possible strength was the following:

His home base in Texas isn’t that far of a drive, and his people are motivated enough to come in from out of state for him.

A reader points out that it is 1,074 miles from Lake Jackson, TX to Ames, IA. 

Four years later:

"I am Shiite," Ali said. "My uncles and cousins were murdered by Saddam’s regime. I wanted desperately to get rid of him. But today, if Saddam’s feet appeared in front of me, I would fall to my knees and kiss them!"

(Photo of a Baghdad girl injured by the chaos unleashed by the US invasion by Ahmad al-Rubaye/Getty.)

A campaign to save David Vitter’s private parts. And an analysis of the costs of keeping prostitution illegal – from the Atlantic archives in 1977.

They keep flooding in:

Q. How many neocons does it take to screw in a light bulb.

A. None. God won’t let their light bulbs go out. And it’s an impertinent question.

or

A. None. George Bush predicts the light bulb will be fully capable of changing itself within 3 months.

"The present day shows with appalling clarity how little able people are to let the other man’s argument count, although this capacity is a fundamental and indispensable condition for any human community.  Everyone who proposes to come to terms with himself must reckon with this basic problem.  For, to the degree that he does not admit the validity of the other person, he denies the ‘other’ within himself the right to exist – and vice versa.  The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity," – C.G. Jung, "The Transcendent Function."

(Photo: Evan Agostini/Getty.)

A more elaborate version:

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Joe Lieberman are all flying over New Orleans in a Blackhawk, surveying the progress that has been made in rebuilding the city and the levees. As they fly over the Ninth Ward, Cheney looks out the window, grins, and says, "You know, I could throw a thousand-dollar bill out the window right now and make one of those poor bastards very happy."

Bush says, "Well, I could throw ten hundred-dollar bills out the window right now and make TEN people very happy."

Not to be outdone, Lieberman chimes in, "Oh yeah? Well, I could throw a hundred $10 bills out the window and make a HUNDRED Americans very happy."

Hearing this, the copter pilot rolls his eyes and says, "Man, I could throw all three of you out the window and make 300 million Americans very happy."

Or call it: election 2008.

Ponnuru:

Most of the time, however, when people say that our rights come from God what they are most concerned about affirming is that those rights are not created by human beings. That, it seems to me, is true, or else there are no human rights at all.

But why could what we understand as human rights not be, in fact, the contingent achievement of a contingent civilization, i.e. the West? And why can these rights not be defended as contingent human achievements that have advanced human dignity and well-being? It seems to me that the mark of the epistemological conservative is precisely a capacity to defend the contingent without illusions and with passion. I can see, in other words, why many would ascribe such rights to God, but not why they can only be ascribed to God. But this is, I guess, a deep divide within conservatism – between those of us who see no reason why humanists and secularists cannot defend the West on contingent grounds and those who believe that only transcendent faith can defend a contingent constitution.

No saint:

A recent article (free registration required) in the Lancet by Dr. Paul Zeitz, head of the Global AIDS Alliance, lays out the damning history. Although then-Vice President Thabo Mbeki (for years, an AIDS denialist) deserves most of the direct blame for South Africa’s 1990s AIDS disaster, it was Mandela who was ultimately in charge at the time. In 1996, his government spent 20 percent of its annual AIDS budget on "a contract for a theatre company to produce a show with questionable public-health messages," according to Zeitz. Following that error in judgment, Mbeki pushed Virodene, an AIDS medicine produced in Africa, through the government’s approval process. Virodene was later deemed to be "unfit for human consumption."