The Dish

The Star Wars edition:

Is it intensifying? Hirsh and Hosenball provide some reporting. Michael Stickings summarizes:

In a nutshell, as one might expect: She wants diplomacy; he wants war. (Although one could argue, and should, that they’ve both had a key hand in the unmitigated disaster that has been Bush’s foreign policy. She was just as much, or almost as much, a warmongerer on Iraq, for example. Needless to say, though, she’s much, much more preferable than he.) But read the whole thing.

Scott Horton worries:

There are now three American hostages in Iranian hands, and five Iranian hostages seized by the Americans in Arbil. Cheney’s decision to block Rice’s proposal to release the Iranians in Arbil was a conscious provocation targeting Tehran, and the Ahmedinejad government has responded just the way Cheney wants: in kind. The hands of this crisis are again approaching midnight, and Rice’s mastery of the strategic playing field in Washington is anything but clear.

The Next Hurrah ponders the internecine strife here.

Greenwald is having none of it:

The media’s function is not merely to pass on self-serving conservative propaganda but to report actual historical fact, to point out when such propaganda deviates from objective truth. The "conservative movement" now desperately trying to depict Bush as an anti-conservative vigorously argued the exact opposite for the last six years. No account of the conservative movement’s chicanery can be remotely accurate without prominently highlighting that fact. George Bush is tied irrevocably around the neck of the right-wing movement because they tied themselves to him when they thought doing so would be politically beneficial.

What about those of us who complained about spending in 2002? Who backed Kerry in 2004 because of Bush’s unconservative record? Who opposed torture as soon as the evidence emerged? Who dissented from the FMA and Schiavo? Who opposed compassionate conservatism from the start? Who wrote books explaining how Bush was not a conservative? I guess there weren’t many of us in public. Give Bruce Bartlett some props. But our existence is also part of the objective truth of the past six years.

It’s a scandal, I tell you.

"I had this conversation with Focus on the Family, and I said I agree with you that family breakdown is a huge crisis, a serious crisis. And I don’t think the Left talks about that enough. My neighborhood is eighty percent single parent families. You can’t overcome poverty with that, with eighty percent single parent families. But how do we reweave the bonds of marriage, family, extended family, and community, to put our arms around the kids? And it’s not just in poor neighborhoods. Kids are falling through the cracks of fractured family in all classes and neighborhoods. So I said to them, I want to rebuild family life and relationships, but explain to me how gay and lesbian people are the ones responsible for all that? which is what their fund-raising strategy suggests. And after about an hour and a half they conceded the point. They said, Okay Jim, we concede that family breakdown is caused much more by heterosexual dysfunction than by homosexuals. But then they said, We can’t vouch for our fundraising department, which says a lot, I think" – Jim Wallis, Powells.com.

Here’s a "tell-us-how-you-really-feel" blog post:

Traditionally the Vice-Presidency has been home to the dim but able career politician whose regional origin or personal contacts/machinery have been electorally useful to the ticket. We’ve had killers (Burr), criminals (Agnew), generically corrupt politicos (Colfax), energetic bullshit artists (TR), morally abject fucktards (Van Buren), and irrascible old farts (G. Clinton) among many other forgettable losers as Vice-Presidents of the United States, but none in our history have been as single-mindedly demented, even wicked, as Richard Cheney.

It’s dropping fast.

Barbara Ehrenreich writes about civil liberties and dance:

Compared with most of the issues that the venerable American civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel takes up, this one may seem like the ultimate in urban frivolity: Late last month, he joined hundreds of hip-hoppers, salsa dancers, Lindy Hoppers and techno-heads boogying along Fifth Avenue to protest New York City’s 80-year-old restrictions on dancing in bars.

As so often in the past, the Human Rights Campaign finds a way to protect Democrats who oppose immigration equality – for b.s. reasons of the potential for "fraud" by gay couples. Why are gay couples more likely to be fraudulent in their immigration applications than straight ones? Amazingly, HRC didn’t even ask the Democrats about the Jesse Helms ban on HIV-positive immigrants or tourists. The questionnaire is also revealing. Notice how civil unions get prime billing – and civil marriage is way down the list. HRC’s long record of failing to back marriage equality in order to placate their Democratic pay-masters continues. How do we expect politicians to favor our equality if the Human Rights Campaign doesn’t have the courage to stand up for it?

More attempts to understand neoconservatism in the Middle East: on TPM and Ezra’s site. Maybe Josh Marshall was right.