Every time my partner Robert Cameron and I get close to getting a sponsor to make this site a going concern, we get asked about our readers. I relate the fact that you are among the smartest readers on the planet and yet for some reason a condescending smile comes over the marketing guy’s face. So here’s a request: click on this link and answer the handful of questions we’ve put together. It’s the usual male/female/income/location stuff and we hope it’ll give us the extra oomph to get a sponsor (we can’t promise though). Just out of curiosity, we’ve added a question about politics to find out where on the scale of right to left andrewsulllivan.com readers are. To make things more interesting, we’ll post the full results on the site by the end of next week. You’ll find out who your fellows are, mean income, geography, marital status, and so on. It should also be a pretty good test of who the people are who read blogs in general, something we know extremely little about. Don’t worry: no one will ask your email address, it’s totally confidential, and we’ll do nothing with the info but post it for your curiosity and use it to lure potential sponsors/advertizers. If you haven’t managed to contribute to the site and feel guilty, here’s a great way to be absolved while spending not a cent. Contributors, please take part as well. For anyone, it’s a completely free way to help support the site. So give it a go. Results to follow …
THE SPEECH: The key passage:
Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing terrorism. This is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.
And the key message is that Israel must have a viable partner, a democratic partner, if peace is to be secured. It cannot be secured while today’s psychotic Palestinian culture and chaotic polity remains in place. And the 1967 borders – give or take a little – are the obvious future contours of the Jewish state. The president was right to appeal to innocent Palestinians over the heads of their corrupt leaders; and he is right to stress hope. I’m sorry to say, however, that seasoned hands will see precious little reason for any.
THE LEFT DISCOVERS ANTI-SEMITISM: A wonderfully clarifying piece by Todd Gitlin in Mother Jones. Better late then never. “The German socialist August Bebel once said that anti-Semitism was ‘the socialism of fools,'” Gitlin writes. “What we witness now is the progressivism of fools. It is a recrudescence of everything that costs the left its moral edge.” Maybe Gitlin hasn’t noticed, but thaht moral edge is looking mighty blunt these days.
LIBERALS DISCOVER I.Q.: Good point noted by UPI’s Steve Sailer. It’s an article of faith among many liberals that I.Q. has no meaning, it’s culturally constructed, and should never be used to judge people’s intellectual ability. But suddenly, when I.Q. is the means by which to rescue retarded criminals on death row, I.Q. is just fine, thank you very much. For the record, I agree with forbidding executions of the mentally retarded. But then I believe in I.Q. as an important and often reliable guage of intelligence. By the way: did anyone think to call former president Bill Clinton up to get his comments on the Supreme Court decision? He signed the execution warrant of a retarded man – as a critical part of his election campaign. Any second thoughts on that one, Bill?
SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “On Sept. 11, Americans were confronted by people ready to die as an expression of their profound moral commitments. Their willingness to die stands in stark contrast to a politics that asks of its members in response to Sept. 11 to shop.” – Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University theologian, as quoted in a fawning profile in the National Catholic Reporter. The piece also notes: “Americans are, for the most part, good, decent and hardworking people, Hauerwas says, but ‘so were the people that supported the Nazis.'”
The Dish 