Richard Bennett

This is a cute little piece:

WASHINGTON, June 27 – Senators from both sides of the aisle competed on Monday to extol the humane treatment of detainees whom they said they saw on a weekend trip to the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. All said they opposed closing the center.

“I feel very good” about the detainees’ treatment, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said.

That feeling was also expressed by another Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

On Monday, Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, said he learned while visiting Guantánamo that some detainees “even have air-conditioning and semiprivate showers.”

Another Republican, Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, said soldiers and sailors at the camp “get more abuse from the detainees than they give to the detainees.”

In the last month, several senators, including some Republicans, have suggested that Congress should investigate reports of abuses at the detention center or that the military should close it to remove a blot on the country’s image.

One senator, Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, has come under criticism and apologized repeatedly for comparing reported abuses at the camps to treatment in Soviet gulags or Nazi concentration camps.

Poor old Durbin is getting the cold shoulder from his buddies on both sides of the aisle these days.

One of the more bizarre tactics employed by opponents of regime change in Iraq has been to insist that war can’t be supported or even suggested except by those who’ve either served in combat or donated a child to serve in combat. Those of us who haven’t done active duty time are mere “chicken hawks” not entitled to an opinion. But in America we believe in civilian control of the military, as Mr. Christopher Hitchens points out:

This expert delivers himself of the opinion that, “If this is such a great cause, let us see one of the Bush daughters in uniform.” Let me do a brief thought experiment here. Do I know a single anti-war person who would be more persuaded if one of the Bush girls joined up? Do you? Can you imagine what would be said about such a cheap emotional stunt? Stalin’s son was taken prisoner by the Nazi invaders (and never exchanged), and Mao’s son was killed in the war that established the present state of North Korea. I am not sure how encouraging such precedents are supposed to be, but they have nothing at all to do with the definition of a just war.

Much more important than this, however, is the implied assault on civilian control of the military. In this republic, elected civilians give crisp orders to soldiers and expect these orders to be obeyed. No back chat can even be imagined, let alone allowed. Do liberals really want the Joint Chiefs to say: “Mr. President, I’ll respect that order when you have a son or daughter in uniform”? It was a great day when President Lincoln fired Gen. George B. McClellan.* It was a great day when President Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur. No presidential brat needed to be on the front line for this point to be understood.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are either worthwhile or they are not (and I see that nobody as yet requires an “exit strategy” from Afghanistan). The worst exploitation of a hero by our military has certainly been the crass lying by the Pentagon about the “friendly fire” death of Pat Tillman, who was looking to risk his life against the Taliban. However, the majority of American dead have still been civilians living in America, and those who prattle on about the sacrifice of children seem not to have read about Beslan, or thought about it, or broken with the lazy old American habit that supposes that war is always “over there.”

And there’s also that issue of Americans believing in democracy, freedom, and human rights. What ever happened with all that?

This is a very shocking story:

Major League Baseball hasn’t narrowed the list of the eight bidders seeking to buy the Washington Nationals and some Republicans on Capitol Hill already are hinting at revoking the league’s antitrust exemption if billionaire financier George Soros , an ardent critic of President Bush and supporter of liberal causes, buys the team.

Rather than mess with baseball, I suggest extraditing Soros to Malaysia so he can be prosecuted for currency manipulation; upon his release from the Malaysian prison, he can be sent to the UK for a similar reckoning. But don’t mess with baseball on account of this feckless weasel, it’s unseemly.

The key to successful marriage is sexual orientation and gender. gay men have it going on:

In Denmark, where homosexuals have been legally able to get hitched (and unhitched) since 1989, it’s a modern reality. But despite stereotypes of gay relationships as short-lived, the divorce rate among Danish homosexuals is only 17 percent, compared to 46 percent for heterosexuals. Can gay Danes teach us something about lasting marital bliss?…

The vast majority of gay marriages in Denmark are male-male, and only 14 percent of these end in divorce, compared to 23 percent of female marriages. The higher rate for lesbians is consistent with data showing that women initiate most of the heterosexual divorces in Denmark. (In the United States, women request about two-thirds of divorces.)

Gay men know that divorce leads to alimony, and that sucks, so to speak.

Mickey Kaus wasn’t impressed by the NY Times’ editorial plea for an anti-American museum at the Trade Center site. New York grantsmen don’t need any more nurturing:

But this isn’t an institution we need in the first place. Do the 9/11 attacks have to become the occasion for the creation of yet another well-upholsetered non-profit boondoggle for public intellectuals and granstmen, and the NYT culture critics who write about them? There are already plenty of institutions in Manhattan where the “vital impulses represented by the arts” can and do express themselves. The hollow, pompous rhetoric already generated by the Freedom Center’s defenders–“nurture a global conversation about freedom in our world today”–demonstrates that it is a highly unpromising venue for this expression.

He’s right and the Times is wrong. And pretentious.

Jeff Jarvis is also right.