The Dish

Chris Crain observes how polarizing Hillary Rodham Clinton is – both between constituencies and within them. Bottom line:

Did HRC rig things for Hillary, or is she truly out front on marriage, inching her way to a full-fledged endorsement? Well, the way the HRC questionnaire frames the issues does mask some important differences in ways that benefit Hillary the most.

The problem is that whatever they say, both HRC the candidate and HRC the organization are not trust-worthy. That’s why they understand each other.

My summary is here. My real-time reactions are here, here, here, here and here. Marc Ambinder’s wrap-up is here.

Jim Fallows marvels at the Manhattan Mussolini’s grasp of Iraq’s role in the war on terror. Last night Rudy said:

It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.

As Jim points out, if that’s true after all we’ve discovered these past few years, then why isn’t the following just as true:

It’s unthinkable that you would leave Osama bin Laden in charge of al Qaeda and be able to fight the war on terror.

Or don’t the Republicans want to go there?

It wasn’t because there were more Independents in the sample, we are now told.

Ross:

All things being equal, I would prefer a President who can reconcile his belief in the truth of Christianity with what seems to me to be the only conclusion that reason allows for at the moment – namely, the common ancestry of life on Earth.

Me too. But that’s not the party that Rove built, is it?

"I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber barron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely more because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations.

And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political programme can never in reality be more than probably right. We never know all the facts about the present and we can only guess the future. To attach to a party programme — whose highest claim is to reasonable prudence — the sort of assent which we should reserve for demonstrable theorems, is a kind of intoxication," – C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 3.

(Photo: Ahmadinejad by Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty.)

He sings, he smokes, he litters! But what a voice. And he has an unnerving resemblance to my old friend, Jeffrey Rosen.

Some home news. I’ve added a blogroll – after seven years of negligence, and called it "Blog Love". And I have a designated assistant, Jessie Roberts – after seven years of solo-flying. It’s a new world.

When I started the Dish during the Clinton presidency (it seems like another universe now, doesn’t it?), there were only a handful of blogs covering the stuff I was interested in. Now there are hundreds and hundreds of good ones, and it’s humanly impossible for one person to keep track of them all. Mercifully, the Atlantic (cue suck-up sound) allowed me to bring interns into the mix, just one example of MSM-bloggy synergy. Jessie is my first alumna of the first batch, and she’s staying to help me stay on top of things. If you’ve noticed an uptick in both the volume and diversity of my links, she and her erstwhile colleagues are responsible for tipping me off. The Dish now routinely looks at science blogs, literary blogs, culture blogs, religion blogs, art-blogs, and any new blogs that spring up and could do with wider exposure. I still browse everywhere and rely also on your tips and links. But I now have a permanent research assistant for back-up. A shout-out to Jessie, and my first team of Dish-preppers, Whitney, Eric, Zoe, and Brooke, who just left for the wider world. A new group began this week. And check out all the blogs in the "Blog Love" list. We worked hard and long on filtering out the blogosphere to highlight our favorite sites. If you’re new to blogging, and want to learn more about what’s out there, it’s a great place to start.

A reader writes:

I just finished "Imperial San Francisco", and the chapters on the Spanish American War, and the continuing war in the Philippines which followed all sound eerily familiar, especially in terms of the rhetoric surrounding both wars and the war in Iraq.

The war in the Philippines included torture, concentration camps, and at least one general who ordered his troops to kill all women and children over the age of 10. This was in order to bring freedom and civilization to the Philippines. This war "officially" ended in 1902, but fighting went on until 1913- that’s 14 years of a very nasty and brutal war.

From Wikipedia:

The shift to guerrilla warfare, however, only angered the Americans into acting more ruthlessly than before. They began taking no prisoners, burning whole villages, and routinely shooting surrendering Filipino soldiers. Much worse were the concentration camps that civilians were forced into, after being suspected of being guerrilla sympathizers. Thousands of civilians died in these camps. In nearly all cases, the civilians suffered much more than the guerrillas.

What we are seeing with the Bush Administration is a reversion to late 19th century American foreign policy- that is, imperialism (annexation of territory to acquire resources – "our resources") disguised as bringing freedom and democracy to the natives.

Just don’t tell Bob Kagan. He’ll get too excited.

(Photo: Filipino casualties on the first day of the war.)

If FaceBook is any indicator, it’s an interesting generation: