The Dish

Here’s stunning video of Barack Obama hearing live the news of the commutation Scooter Libby’s sentence for perjury. It strikes me as revealing that Obama immediately sees a parallel to the way a young black man is being railroaded by the justice system, with no recourse. Yes, Bush had no power over Genarlow Wilson’s sentence. But the contrast is striking – and corrosive of confidence in equal justice under the law. When such injustices are a common occurrence among the poor and marginalized, the special treatment meted out to one of the president’s friends is particularly galling.

Chicago, Illinois, 9.10 am.

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

I’m a litle slack-jawed at this quote from Bush in a confab with a handful of journalistic handmaidens:

"[L]ast fall, if I had been part of this polling, if they had called upstairs and said, do you approve of Iraq I would have been on the 66 percent who said, ‘No I don’t approve.’ That’s why I made the decision I made. To get in a position where I would be able to say ‘Yes, I approve.’"

I wonder if he would have voted Democrat, like so many of the non-approvers did. But the news in the story is that Bush intends somehow to ignore military reality and not abide by necessary troop rotations and draw down in the spring:

President Bush rejected the notion that he will be constrained by the availability of troops come next spring and will have to draw down the surge. He said, with a pointed ending to his answer, "The key factor that I’m confident that David Petraeus is looking at as he comes back is how to achieve the initial objective he set out, which is to provide enough security for the political process to move forward. I’m sure that in the bowels of the Pentagon people are looking at troop rotations and troop movements, but that is not the primary objective of our commander on the ground—next question."

Asked specifically if that meant that Petraeus would get the troops to continue past the spring if he needed them, he said, "We will work as hard as we can. People said we couldn’t find the troops for the last reinforcement as well," but he added that he’s mindful of troop rotations and time in theater.

He said, eventually, "We need to be in a position that can sustain a long-term troop presence," although that depends on "conditions on the ground."

"A long-term troop presence." He intends to go nowhere. He’s the kind of person who, when he sees a wall, accelerates towards it. But it’s not his car.

"So, my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it’s worth remembering that the fictions with which we previously populated our world may have some function that it’s worth trying to understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water; because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, or something like them, to be there. I suspect that as we move further and further into the field of digital or artificial life we will find more and more unexpected properties begin to emerge out of what we see happening and that this is a precise parallel to the entities we create around ourselves to inform and shape our lives and enable us to work and live together. Therefore, I would argue that though there isn’t an actual god there is an artificial god and we should probably bear that in mind. That is my debating point and you are now free to start hurling the chairs around!" – Douglas Adams, Boing Boing.

"Well sometimes I get the menstrual cramps real hard." From "Raising Arizona."

Matt has a good point here, I think:

Similarly, the gay rights movement does indeed want gay couples to be unmolested in their private conduct. But their demands go far beyond that. They want to regulate who you may employ, who you may rent a house to, etc., etc., etc. — not merely a state that refrains from discriminating, but a state that takes the lead in fighting discrimination.

To me, this is all to the good. And if Cato Institute employees want to endorse it, that’s all to the good as well. But it’s not libertarianism.

That’s a fair assessment even now of the main agenda of gay rights groups. It’s not, however, my own agenda. Nor is it that of many gay libertarian/conservatives. For a different flavor of discourse on gay rights, try the Independent Gay Forum. Virtually Normal tried to grapple with this. I argued specifically against the liberal recipes for gay equality: against hate crime laws and even against employment discrimination laws. I argued that a conservative position on gay rights would leave private discrimination and prejudice alone and change only the government’s stance so that all citizens are treated equally by the state, even if they are subject to discrimination by private entities. Virtually Normal did contribute, I think, to a deeper understand that marriage rights and military service were central to the gay rights movement. In that, it helped revolutionize the gay rights movement – against the wishes of many of its leftist leaders. But I had no luck trying to shift the liberal nannying and tolerance-mongering of the gay establishment.

Still, we’re not all liberals. For the record. But it’s a quixotic position, I will sadly concede. Freedom is not as popular as it once was. And liberals have helped whittle it away.

Tony Blair really has gone, hasn’t he?

A reader nails it, I think:

I have taught at a military school now for about thirty years. Two years ago, a Lieutenant Colonel, new to the faculty, dropped into my office for advice.  "Dr. *******, I made a mathematics mistake on the blackboard today, plain for all to see. Am I of high enough rank that I can claim I didn’t make a mistake?"

My answer was "Hell, no, you’re not!"

But our president believes he is of high enough rank …

And he has gotten away with everything, has he not?

That 1982 piece by James Fallows on learning to write on a computer provoked major blogospheric chatter. Here’s another classic Atlantic piece on another technological innovation. It’s Mark Twain hearing someone talk on the telephone for the first time:

Without answering, I handed the telephone to the applicant, and sat down. Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world, — a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says. Well, I heard the following remarkable series of observations, all from the one tongue, and all shouted, — for you can’t ever persuade the gentle sex to speak gently into a telephone."

In 1976: "perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser." Look, we all have a right to change our minds. I see no reason to believe that Christopher’s evolution has not been completely genuine. And he noted the torture and barbarism at the time.