The Dish

Is this study (PDF) a dire warning of an enemy within? Only 40 percent of American Muslims believe Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks. 47 percent consider themselves Muslims first, Americans second. And yet at the same time, America is doing a far, far better job of integrating Muslim immigrants than Europe, and the vast majority abhor terrorism. Money quote:

The survey shows that although many Muslims are relative newcomers to the U.S., they are highly assimilated into American society. With the exception of very recent immigrants, most report that a large proportion of their closest friends are non-Muslims. On balance, they believe that Muslims coming to the U.S. should try and adopt American customs, rather than trying to remain distinct from the larger society. And by nearly two-to-one (63%-32%) Muslim Americans do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.

Malkin freaks out (surprise!). Chotiner worries. So does Douglas Farah. There does seem to me to be some cause for concern. The reflexive defense of all things Muslim and the support of even a small minority for religious violence are troubling – and have no parallel among other religions or ethnicities. But an over-reaction might actually compound matters. Broadly speaking, I think blogger Thoreau has the best balance. Vigilance and clarity are what we need – and faith that in the long run, the genius of America will integrate Muslim immigrants as successfully as it has Catholics. Compared to France or Britain, the US has been doing a great job. Not the government, of course. The society.

(Hat tip: Juan Cole.)

Goodling contradicts McNulty and confesses to political vetting of US attorneys. Knock me down with a feather.

Ross puts the boot in:

Allow me to torpedo my chances of signing a lucrative book deal with Threshold by suggesting that if I were placed in charge of a right-leaning imprint at a major publisher, I hope I would manage to make it something more than a clearinghouse for Cheney family memoirs, screeds by loudmouthed TV personalities, ghostwritten quickie books, anti-Malcolm Gladwell Malcom Gladwell knockoffs, and polemics by TWA Flight 800/Ron Brown conspiracy theorists.

He’s referring to Mary Matalin’s pile of preposterous piffle. Daniel Larison adds his considerable edge here. Alex Massie writes:

Is it unbearably snobbish or sniffy to note that, whatever one’s own literary credentials, it requires considerable generosity of spirit to grant any of these volumes the title "book" in anything other than the meanest, lowest, technical sense of the term?

Er: no.

The daughter of the vice-president has given birth to a baby boy. Money quote from the Christianist media:

According to reports, Mary’s homosexual partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, "will have no legal relationship with her child. She can’t adopt as a second parent. She won’t have her name on the birth certificate."

It’s such an important Christian value to keep a child vulnerable, isn’t it? And to stigmatize and discriminate against one of his moms.
 

The master of the bureaucracy made sure the Pentagon never comprehensively investigated the torture he personally authorized – and made sure he was never held in any way responsible. A just declassified Pentagon study sheds some light on impressive maneuvring by the retired war criminal.

A reader writes:

There is saying around certain well-known 12 step programs that we ‘act our way into better thinking’ rather than ‘think our way into better actions’.

I have been reading many of the links, comments and, of course, your blog entries regarding torture for some time and it hit me this morning that this, for me, is the crux of the disagreement. Some of the smartest pro-torture bloggers and commenters out there find one perceived legal lor moral loophole after another, as if by applying their considerable brainpower to the matter they can somehow escape the essential truth that torturing people is just bad behavior. I can relate to the way their minds work.

If I dare to compare the conduct of a democratic nation to that of an individual like myself, a recovering addict, I see the temptation to rationalize behavior on the basis of the survival instinct as a deepening swamp of fear – the fear leads to sadistic thinking, justifications and the loathing of the ‘other’. Then I lose all circumspection attained by a clear-eyed view of my own past wrongdoings. Any dignity I have achieved by making amends for past misdeeds or harm to others is wiped out by my justifications for these new survival strategies.

Just as I have lost my way on the path to personal dignity as a recovering addict on a few occasions, I long for the time when the conduct of our elected officials, employees and agents is codified to the degree that there’s no more than one person who can equivocate the matter of whether to torture or not. We take presidential elections seriously for a reason, and that man or woman’s judgment to step away from ‘right action’ at such a juncture should surely be one of the criteria by which we elect them.

Tyler Cowen has some fun proposals:

1. Allow all candidates to watch a short debate of experts — with a fraud or two thrown in — and ask them to evaluate what they just heard and why they reached the conclusion they did.

2. Test candidates for the ability to spot liars.

3. Give each candidate a substantive message and then give each two minutes to turn it into pure fluff.  This tests communications skills, plus we can see the meat grinder in action.

4. Require each candidate to conduct an orchestra.  Watch to what extent each candidate defers to the players, and to what extent he prefers "panache."

Or ask them, if all else fails, what they’d actually do in Iraq if they were president right now. There’s a concept.

The gap between him and Rudy continues to narrow.

ABC News reports on the president’s authorization of covert action against Iran. It’s not a military initiative, and should have been authorized years ago. It’s also surely no big whoop. It is obviously in the West’s interests to do all we can to support the Persian opposition, to help disseminate the truth about the theocracy, to throw as much money as we can at the forces of freedom in that country. But the angry response from some of the Bushite blogs has Brad Plumer worried:

Let’s see, I count one, two, three conservative bloggers all saying the same thing: Now that ABC News has blown the lid off the president’s secret plan to have the CIA destabilize the Iranian regime from within, the only option we have left is to take military action. Bush never wanted war, mind you, but the liberal media and those loose-lipped "traitors" in the agency have left him no choice.

I see this leak as being a complete non-event. Both Plumer’s response to the bloggers and the bloggers’ own response to ABC News’ little scoop strike me as more than a little paranoid.