Goodbye Fredo

Today, the President said:

It's sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeded from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons.

Actually, no, it's sad that we live in a time when the President of the United States would assert that a dishonest and incompetent hack like Alberto Gonzales is a talented and honorable person.

Schism

The moral of the recent Bobby Jindal dustup is rather banal: people with strong religious convictions tend to think that those beliefs are true, and consequently, that those who hold different beliefs are wrong. The only surprising thing here is that this kind of open conflict doesn't happen more often.

Or maybe not. Politically it has proven very convenient for conservative Protestants and Catholics (and to a more limited extent, conservative Christians and Jews) to join forces to fight "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," as well as liberals in general. Ecumenicalism today works more like a political than a religious doctrine, the sacred version of Reagan's "Eleventh Commandment" against attacking other Republicans.

Political expediency, of course, doesn't do away with the deep doctrinal disputes among the various religious sects. If you can bracket Jindal's obvious hubris, there is something almost refreshing about his expression of such a deeply-felt intolerance toward political allies who he knows are all going straight to hell.

Sunday Reading

Looking for something to do inside on this hot-as-hell Sunday afternoon? Try reading these excellent pieces.

• From today's New York Times, a fascinating retrospective about how the war in Iraq and general administration incompetence are causing us to fail in Afghanistan, too.
• From the Village Voice, a pretty astonishing takedown of Rudy Guiliani on his primary (only) issue of terrorism. He's much worse than you probably think.
• From Jane Mayer writing in the New Yorker, the tragic tale of how the US came to conclude that the same torture techniques that the Soviets used to generate false confessions for their show trials would be a useful enhancement to our intelligence capability in the "GWOT."

Why Bill Richardson Breaks My Heart

In a lot of ways, I'd like to pull for Bill Richardson in the Democratic primary. His resume is just what you'd want for a president: a wide range of government experience and some expertise in some very important fields, like foreign policy and energy. He's against the war and for a full troop withdrawal, which I support. He's got a solid record on issues important to me like civil liberties, and while he's not as progressive as I am on some things, nothing about his social policies gives me serious pause. True, he's not a very good campaigner, but he doesn't seem to have any skeletons in his closet, either. He also seems like a genuinely nice person with a decent, if sometimes goofy, sense of humor. These are all good things.

But every once in a while, he will say something so stupid that I really have to question whether he knows what he's talking about.

Grammar Lesson

In the wake of the latest "I walked around a market in Iraq and didn't get blown up so we're winning" narrative by some oh-so-serious foreign policy experts, and in anticipation that General Petraeus's September report will just be more of the same old same old, Speaker Nancy Pelosi provides a much-needed grammar lesson: "The plural of anecdote is not data."

Indeed, in an enterprise as large and complex as occupying a country, it's no doubt possible to find all sorts of "successes". But at a certain point, our revived fascination with lists of military victories begins to sound a lot like that talk back in 2004 about how great things were about to become because so many new schools were being built. A nice thing, to be sure, this school-building, but it didn't improve the political situation — the root of the problem(s) — one bit. And neither is the "surge". In fact, these "successes" in Anbar (that don't, in fact, have much to do with increased troop levels in the first place) are getting ready to literally blow up in our faces.