The Dish

Rarely have I sat through fourteen minutes of an interview and learned less about a major candidate. But check it out for yourself. Here he is on Iraq:

"We must take every opportunity that we have and to exhaust every reasonable hope we have to not lose that."

On taxes, I’m with him. But he has no proposals to cut entitlement spending to the degree that we must to keep taxes low. He says Goldwater is his idol. So why isn’t Bush his nemesis? No one has destroyed Goldwater’s legacy as effectively as Bush has. Thompson seems charming if you need someone to while away a long evening – and you’ll have to remind him of what’s recently been in the news. But he also seems bored. And remarkably free of any specific ideas to run on.

A brutal counter-blast against Hitch’s best-selling anti-theist screed appears in the new "Commonweal". Money quote:

Hitchens’s claim that the God of Moses "never mentions human solidarity and compassion at all" is preposterous, given the Torah’s injunctions about forgiveness of debts, redistribution of land, or openness to strangers, or the prophets’ exhortations to mercy, justice, and beating swords into ploughshares. He rightly contends that the crimes of Nazism and Communism do not mitigate the felonies of religion; indeed, he writes, "one might hope that religion had retained more sense of its dignity than that." True, but that sense of dignity is inseparable from standards by which the religious can identify and condemn atrocities done in their name – standards that fascists and Stalinists never recognized, let alone applied.

Doctrines of racial purity lead inexorably to repression, ethnic cleansing, or genocide; acceptance of "historical necessity" inevitably sanctions "the necessary murder," as Auden later regretted putting it. There is nothing even remotely comparable in these secular ideologies to the command to love one’s enemies. Those Christians down the ages who tried to prevent the crimes of their horrifically errant brethren did so because they believed – often at the cost of their lives or fortunes – that the human person was the imago Dei, a conviction they derived from Christian theology.

I haven’t yet read the book, but I hope Hitch did not merely dismiss Augustine as "a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus."

Ten reasons to appreciate Zoloft.

A reader dug up what would surely be Abraham Simpson’s acceptance speech were he to do us all a favor and run for president. He certainly seems more clued in to current events than, say, Fred Thompson. The Onion would have to endorse, I suspect:

The realists are striking back against the president’s war for democracy and against Islamism. Is he pursuing a complete contradiction? Long-term, you can see the logic in principle. In the short run, in the actual Middle East, Jim Baker’s prejudice in favor of "consensual authoritarianism" seem to have the weight of the recent evidence behind it:

The reason democracy is losing the competition is that consensual authoritarianism produces security for its peoples, and exports security to its neighbors and the world.  We musn’t be blind to these facts: these regimes cooperate with the world in combating terrorism and containing an aggressive Iran, they have peace treaties with Israel or float peace initiatives, they don’t threaten or intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, and they don’t seek weapons of mass destruction. None of them has gone to war in the last thirty-plus years.

And who are the net exporters of insecurity? These are states that have multi-polar or pluralistic systems: Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and what some call Palestine. These systems aren’t democracies, but in terms of formal practices like elections, they’ve actually gone the longer distance. Yet they don’t provide security for their peoples, and they export insecurity, in the form of terrorism, refugees, radical Islam, and nuclear threats.  What’s discouraging is that this isn’t true in only some of the cases, or only half of them. It’s true, for now, in all if them.

By fostering radical insecurity as well as a formal democratic process in Iraq, we may well have poisoned its reputation for the foreseeable future. And, alas, no Gersonian rhetoric from the president will undo the chaos Rumsfeld deliberately created. In simpler terms:

Baghdad is not Bonn, Beirut is not Warsaw, and Tehran is not Prague.

Burke would understand.

A reader writes:

The ease with which the Bush administration generally, and its spokespeople in particular, lies still manages to astonish me, even after six and a half years. Take a look at this story from Reuters about the theft of Bush’s watch in Albania:

Albanian police say the reports of President Bush’s watch being stolen while greeting the crowd in Tirana are untrue. However, video from the presidential visit shows that while he began to work the crowd with a timepiece on his left arm, within seconds it was gone. "The story is untrue and the president did not lose his watch," a spokesman for the embassy in Tirana said.

The article is accompanied by footage clearly showing that the watch was stolen, yet a spokesman for the U.S. embassy echoed the statements of the Albanian police (who are clearly embarrassed by the episode).

I don’t know which possibility is most frightening: 1) that the administration has so little respect for the intelligence of the American public that it thinks it can get away with saying literally anything, no matter how untrue, and no matter how strong the evidence against it; 2) that the administration knows that 70% of the American public won’t believe them, but only cares about the 30% that will believe them; or 3) that the administration actually believes its own lies.

Personally, I think it’s all three:  they started out believing their own lies, then moved on to thinking that they could say anything whether it was true or not, and have now reached the point where they only care about the 30% of the American public who will always believe whatever they say.

"Mr. Lago is the mayor of this scenic Swedish town of 60,000 people [Sodertalje], which last year took in twice as many Iraqi refugees as the entire United States…" – NYT today. Hey, since his college days, someone else has always had to clean up after Bush’s messes.

My media contacts in Britain have all had a cow about Tony Blair’s Al Gore impersonation this week. The prime minister began his premiership by slavishly sucking up to the media, creating the world’s biggest spin operation, and subsequently didn’t like it when a few saw through the blather. The Blair government is also knee-deep in corporate sleaze, something not so well known among Blair’s American fans. Simon Jenkins lets it rip today on Blair’s anti-media chutzpah, in a review of the latest corruption scandal:

As the onion skins peel back, al-Yamamah emerges as not a defence contract at all but a vehicle for financial "skimming" by rich Saudis (and Britons such as Mark Thatcher). While British governments could argue that before the 1998 convention such payments were legal, that has not been so since and they were specifically outlawed in 2001. Whitehall has been complicit in a colossal, secret and illegal act of bribery to win a grossly inflated contract. That is why Goldsmith had to suppress the SFO inquiry and why BAE dare not let Lord Woolf near the stinking trough. And Blair has the gall to call the press cynical.

I like Blair, but I haven’t had to live with him this past decade. My own view is that Enoch Powell was right: politicians who complain about the press are like sailors complaining about the weather.

James Joyner sees the sense in tough love for fat kids. Megan McArdle isn’t buying all the obesity hype.

Marc Ambinder creates a fake anti-Obama ad in order to help Obama refute a looming smear. Others, meanwhile, are making freelance Obama ads as well. I swear I have nothing to do with this one:

A reader adds:

Somewhere in America, Ron Paul Girl is finishing up her video, which centers around the gold standard.

And somewhere in America, K-Lo is dusting off her Romney lyrics. Eww.