The Dish

The backlash is often violent, from Riga to Moscow:

[Businessman and anti-gay campaigner] Igors Maslakovs’ views on homosexuality, he says, are Christian beliefs. He has particular affinity with the New Generation Church, an evangelical organisation with a swelling international congregation of mostly Russian speakers. The group now has 108 churches in 15 countries, including Argentina, Israel and America. It is headed by Aleksey Ledyaev, a publicity-savvy pastor with close ties to the Christian right in America. In February, Pastor Ledyaev attended a breakfast at the White House hosted by President Bush. "He’s a very good man, a very powerful man. He has many connections with parliament and worldwide connections to the USA and Russia. He agrees with me," says Maslakovs.

Pastor Ledyaev declined an interview, writing instead: "I believe that Christians and their traditional values are discriminated against today, and not the gays and lesbians." In his sermons, he has been more explicit, saying of homosexuals: "God will bring evil upon them! God will drive them out and they will fall!" Many of the counterprotesters at last year’s Pride wore "I Love the New Generation" T-shirts.

(Photo: Members of Russian profascist organisation "Rus" (Russia) demonstrate against the gay pride march, in Moscow 26 May 2007. By Alexey Sazonov/AFP/Getty.)

Who knew? A lot of people, it appears.

Peter Hitchens is a skeptic about divine providence behind Reagan, Thatcher and JP2:

There is a sort of presumption in the idea that God is particularly interested in liberating people from Communism, let alone from the rule of Jimmy Carter or of the British Labor Party. His kingdom is not of this world, as Christ unambiguously said. Go to Poland now, and you will find that the church and the Christian faith are, if anything, weaker than they were under the heel of the Communists. I might add that Poland, though freed from the iron manacles of Moscow, is now instead wrapped up in the sticky marshmallow bonds of the European Union, a despotic, secretive, and lawless empire with the strong potential to get much worse than it already is. As for the U.S. and Britain, I will get round to that. I really wouldn’t like to speculate on what God might have wanted to happen, but if He was hoping for the current arrangements, I should be very much surprised.

Billy Reid spreads some:

A reader writes:

I think it is important that you show the about-face of someone like Peggy Noonan. Something about it struck me as ridiculous though. I think it is because, whether you reached this conclusion now or three years ago, it came much too late.  As a conservative with libertarian leanings, how could you fail to not be suspicious of this administration sooner, led by someone who wrapped himself in the flag after 9-11 and so clearly engaged in fear-mongering?  Remember operation flight-suit?  By then it was well past the time when reasonable people should have been afraid, not of the terrorists, but of a government so clearly willing to exploit the fears of its citizens for the most trivial partisan gains, a government led by someone so clearly dependent upon extreme political theater to accomplish anything.

I lived 4 blocks north of the WTC, in Tribeca, and as horrible as that was, what I witnessed in this country in the months following scared me more: the total silence of any opposition to the president’s policies after 9-11and the glorification of war and hero-worship engaged in by the mainstream media.  Even the internet offered little in the way of alternatives.  All the problems we see now I think can be traced to that silence and the excess of maudlin sentiment and lack of perspective all around. It’s absurd to me that many vehement supporters of this president and his policies, the excuse-makers and seemingly innocent people who attacked anyone who opposed the president’s policies as unpatriotic or as a supporter of terrorists, should have much an audience any more. 

They abandoned their principles and reason when it counted most. Some of them probably had neither to begin with. There should be a wall of shame for them or perhaps an asterisk by their names for the next ten years, or the word dupe in parenthesis. This president has had so much help from supporters outside of his direct circle of influence, mostly from amoral, ambitious types and the occasional well-meaning but frightened intellectuals; assembled together in their unqualified support for another human being they did an excellent job exploiting the fear and uncertainty of others and silencing any alternative voices – as if those alternative ideas were in fact what they were afraid of, instead of the terrorists.  Must not question the fearless, infallible leader.

I worry about what will happen to the United States if there is another terrorist attack and someone like Rudy Guiliani is president.  Perhaps he is autocratic, but with pricinples that will restrain.  We can hope.  As it is now, it seems that Americans must count on the moral backbone of the head of the executive branch to keep from abandoning the American Experiment altogether.  But if that is the case, isn’t the experiment already finished?

PETA’s latest gambit.

Bourbon, Missouri, 7 am. "The flag hangs for Jimmy Summers, 1986-2007. Killed over the wkend in Iraq."

For an interactive gallery of Dish readers’ window views across the world, click here.

"I must urge the men out there: stay away from Viagra. It is a Pandora’s box of truth. Despite how much you may want to get into Pandora’s box, Viagra will force you to gaze at the hideous reality: men are lousy lovers," – John Hargrave.

Alas, the news is more complex than that. The blue pill can reduce your sperm count as well:

And this is where Pfizer turns a liability into a brand new marketing opportunity, right? Younger fellas, who don’t want to have kids, may now think of Viagra as not just a party drug, but a form of birth control …

The security issue has led to a strange role for American embassies across the globe:

In reality, American embassies are increasingly cut off from those very countries in which the U.S. is supposed to be fostering better relations, and worse, create caricatures of the detached diplomat more interested in tennis than work. Even in Doha, a relative safe haven from terrorism, the embassy is many meters off the main road, and to enter, you pass through a security checkpoint staffed by Filipinos. Depending on your business at the embassy, you then go through another layer of security to enter the building. Even for embassy employees, entering the building was time consuming. For foreigners, it could be a good chunk of the afternoon.

There’s a loss here:

I grew up in South America so I’ve had experience with the US consular system. When I was a kid, sure, there were Marine guards in bullet-proof guard huts checking you out, but in effect, you could walk in off the street. What happens to the point of an embassy or consulate if the locals can’t get in at all, and the consular staff lives apart from and has no interaction with the locals?

A reader writes:

The reader you posted stated that Noonan and others who are late to the party have no credibility to criticize Bush. Hogwash. Have you and this reader never heard of the expression "the straw that breaks the camel’s back?" You maintain loyalty in politics even when you are in disagreement with a party or a President. If you are part of a political movement you realize that no politician is ideologically pure or completely without fault.  However, you do expect that your loyalty will be rewarded with more than mere lip service to one’s ideological beliefs and you expect more than comically bad incompetence.

A lot of intellectual conservatives are now asking themselves at which moment did they lose faith in Bush.  For some, such as yourself, it was Abu Ghraib.  For others, it was the chaos that unfolded in late 2003-04 and the intransigent refusal of Rumsfeld and Bush to respond to it.

For another group, it was the President’s use of warrantless wiretaps and vast expansions of federal power.  For many it was the realization that two of the three biggest domestic accomplishments for Bush (outside of the tax cuts) were Ted Kennedy sponsored pieces of legislation.  For a huge number it was the culture of profligate spending.

For myself, the seminal moment at which I lost real faith in this President was in the aftermath of Katrina.  He could no longer profess to hold the mantle of competence and indeed, he was the poster child of cronyism and ineffectiveness.  He proved himself to be dilatory and disinterested, all in the face of the worst natural disaster in this country’s history.  Granted the local politicians screwed up royally (and are still doing so in NOLA), but he is the POTUS and is expected, at the least to focus our efforts to recover, and to lead.  He held that mantle after 9/11, he pissed it down the drain after Katrina.

The last straws for conservatives are the White House’s arrogant refusal to contenance any criticism of what it is doing in Iraq coupled with its arrogant and condescending ramroding of a disastrous immigration boondoggle, all the while telling the people "who have carried his water for years" that they are a bunch of bigots and ignoramuses. 

Don’t forget Andrew that the scales had to fall from your eyes as well.  It has come at different times and in different ways for all of us, but it does not make Noonan’s critique of Bush any less credible that it has come later than your own.  It just means that you were more foresighted than she was.