The Dish

Manchester, New Hampshire, 8.40 pm.

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"Rudy’s preposterous position is compounded by the fact that he professes to be a Catholic. As Catholics, we are called, indeed required to be pro-life, to cherish and protect human life as a precious gift of God from the moment of conception until the time of natural death. As a leader, as a public official, Rudy Giuliani has a special obligation in that regard … I can just hear Pilate saying, ‘You know, I’m personally opposed to crucifixion but I don’t want to impose my belief on others,’" – Bishop Thomas J. Tobin of Rhode Island.

With each election cycle, the conflation of religion and politics intensifies.

Finally!

Try not to flinch.

It’s obviously an aberration as a primary indicator. But surely a lot of its aberration has to do with the following fact:

The survey of 310 Democrats and 160 independents who "lean" Democratic, taken Friday through Sunday, has a margin of error of +/-5 percentage points… Among Democrats alone, Clinton leads Obama by 5 points, 34%-29%. That’s a significant narrowing from the USA TODAY Poll taken in mid-May, when she led by 17 points. Among independents, Obama leads by 9 points, 31%-22%.

Clinton has the base support that her name, her husband and her long record among the Democrats have earned her. But as a general election candidate, as someone who can appeal to independents and Republicans, as someone who can actually enlarge the Democrats – Obama is quite obviously the superior candidate. Do the Dems want to go forward and outward? Or backward and inward? That’s the choice they face between the Senator from Illinois and the Senator from New York.

He’s no longer charged with planting or even thinking about planting a dirty bomb. The charges he finally faces – after years of solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, vershaerfte Vernehmung – are based in large part on wiretapped phone conversations whose meanings seem ambiguous. Recall this:

Mr. Padilla, an American convert to Islam who was named an enemy combatant after his arrest in 2002, has the highest profile of the three but has not figured prominently in arguments over the calls.

That is because his voice is heard on only seven of the 300,000 or so calls that the F.B.I. recorded from 1994 to 2001. The government added his case to those of Mr. Hassoun and Mr. Jayyousi only after transferring him to civilian custody last year, as the Supreme Court considered taking up the legality of his military detention.

I can only hope that, finally, he is getting a fair trial. I’m not there, but testimony such as this does not exactly reflect well on the government:

Earlier Monday, the jury heard from Herbert Atwell, a former convict who said he attended a mosque in Broward County with Mr. Hassoun and Mr. Padilla in the 1990s. He said Mr. Padilla had been very quiet and carried a Spanish-language Koran, while Mr. Hassoun gave fiery speeches about the importance of "raising money for mujahedeen fighters all over the world."

But, in testimony that could paradoxically help the defense, Mr. Atwell said he had never perceived Mr. Hassoun to support terrorism or "mujahedeen fighters" to be terrorists. He said he believed they were "defending Muslims under attack."

"We even have a mass grave now in the university. Imagine flesh and body parts — we buried that here at Mustansiriya University. Imagine how bad our situation was" – an Iraqi student "who would give only his first name, Saif, for fear of retribution."

The mother of all time-wasters:

For example, Tom Cruise weighs the equivalent of 1,760 human eye balls. In case you wanted to know.

The actual converter is here.

A reader writes:

I should have read farther down when I fussed at you just a second ago in my ‘Reverse Flytrap’ email. You do have a plan! It’s fabulous, well thought out and sure to succeed:

"It will have to get worse, much worse, before it can get better."

And, of course, after we flee, after everyone who wanted a decent civil society is killed and after the Jihadists seize power and ally with Iran, things will be just great. If you think Bush has a lot to answer for — and he surely does – just imagine the blood on the hands of those who actually believe that leaving is a policy that offers anything other than a much larger disaster. 

Of course, I can see it now. It isn’t the cut-and-runners who will be to blame for the disaster they saw coming and decided nonetheless to proceed. It will be Bush, all Bush and nothing but Bush. Bush will be responsible for the bloodbath and the resurgent Jihadists and every other thing that might happen when we declare defeat and go home. Just as Bush is surely guilty of ineptly carrying out a valid war, the cut-and-runners are guilty of cowardice, lack of perseverance and having no real idea what they should do other than flee. Fleeing is not an idea; it is the product of intellectual and moral panic.

One point: "after the Jihadists seize power and ally with Iran"? You really think that is al Qaeda’s goal? Or the Sunni insurgents? My sense is that a withdrawal would mean a fight by Sunni Jihadists against Shiite Jihadists. The war between fundamentalisms would be bloody, but it would also change the narrative. It would reveal that the West is not the fundamental problem in the Islamic world. Islamism is. The only people who can fight this war are Muslims. And the only people who can win it are Muslims. We may be unable to prevent some collateral damage from the conflict. But my guess is that we are maximizing collateral damage to U.S. lives and failing to move the ball forward by occupying Iraq for the indefinite future.