Month: December 2009

Another performance by the soon-to-be knight:

A reader writes:

Three years ago my partner and I visited India.  The sites that impressed me even more than the Taj Mahal were the man-made Ajanta and Ellora Caves.  For centuries, Buddhist monks and others, using primitive tools, spent their entire lives carving these caves knowing they would never live to see them finished.  Back home I was working on a lawsuit where corporate directors had committed fraud, doing all they could to inflate the next quarter's earnings reports.  All that mattered was the next financial statement. 

For all I know these caves could have been built with child slave labor but our tour guide explained to us that they were built by monks, men who felt connected to what had gone before them, who worked on it themselves, and would pass the work on when they died.  For centuries.  I like to think they saw themselves spiritually connected to the passage of time and they dedicated their lives to that trust.   

I think of Obama that way.  Great change comes at glacial speed.  George Washington didn't become a king but he still owned black slaves.  So did Jefferson yet that didn't stop him from expanding democracy with the Louisiana Purchase.  Lincoln waited two years to free the slaves and did so only in the South, exempting the border states still fighting for the Union.  Even the New Deal, arguably the most significant change in our government since the revolution, didn't include healthcare, didn't desegregate the schools, etc.  Only a George Bush thinks that the one-man "decider" gets to change things at once, at his whim.  What a fool.  Obama understands what the Bush's of the world and even Bill Clinton fail to grasp.  A leader is only as great as her or his contributions to the flow of historical progress. 

 

No way will Obama accomplish all that he wants. But when his time ends, the right person following him will be able to build on his accomplishments, just like the monks at Ellora and Ajanta left majestic but incomplete structures for those that followed them.  Contrast that to Bush, whose predecessor has had to devote much of his time to fixing the mess he left.

 

Josh Shahryar profiles Grand Ayatollah Yousef Sanei, the most prominent of the remaining opposition clerics:

Sane’i is the perfect man to replace Montazeri. He represents the same brand of moderate Islam that Montazeri espoused. This includes his stance that women have equal rights with men and can be judges and sources of jurisprudence. He has denounced suicide bombings, considers nuclear weapons as being against the soul of Islam and forbidden and perhaps shockingly, even believes that followers of other religions if they are sincere would go to heaven. These are the qualities that endeared him to the late Montazeri and this is the reason why today, thousands of people from around Iran announced their willingness to defend him against the government.

And he'll need it; Sanei's offices were attacked by Basiji militiamen yesterday.

The LA Times reports:

Large-scale protests spread in central Iranian cities [including Esfahan and Najafabad] Wednesday, offering the starkest evidence yet that the opposition movement that emerged from the disputed June presidential election has expanded beyond its base of mostly young, educated Tehran residents to at least some segments of the country’s pious heartland. […] The central region is considered by some as the conservative power base of the hard-liners in power.

Iranian authorities are clearly alarmed by the spread of the protests.

Mojtaba Zolnour, a mid-ranking cleric serving as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative to the elite and powerful Revolutionary Guard, acknowledged widespread unrest around the country. “There were many [acts of] sedition after the Islamic Revolution,” he said, according to the website of the right-wing newspaper Resala. “But none of them spread the seeds of doubt and hesitation among various social layers as much as the recent one.”

Scott Lucas provides a similar analysis. Video above was shot in Najafabad yesterday.

Today on the Dish, Andrew presented his first-year evaluation of Obama. Readers responded here and here. John Cole reviewed the president's record of promises while Steve Lombardo and Andrew analyzed his approval rating.

Sully also tackled Robbie George over natural law and responded to a reader's dissent on Gore. Sprung fisked Jane Hamsher on healthcare and worried about the future. Megan called out Harry Reid. Beck set off the red hathos alert while others on the paranoid right continued to retreat to the fifties. And their fearless leader tweeted some more on death panels.

The Dish revisited Jim Manzi's important piece in National Affairs and ran more commentary on gays in comics. More depressing Christmas songs from Roy Orbison and Dr. Elmo. Another VFYR update here. Ten more MHBs of the year here. And a spectacular viral skit here.

— C.B.

(Today's Wrap brought to you from the Chicago O'Hare Airport. Ugh.)

And a merry Christmas to all you geeks and hippies out there (you know who you are):

Great catch by Jim Warren:

When the dinner was over, "I don't think I'm dying. I go to sit down and nobody's meeting my eye. Only [the late journalist-turned-White House spokesman] Tony Snow comes over and says I'm doing a great job." Then Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia came his way and told him he was brilliant.

"I said, oh, s-, don't let me like Antonin Scalia!"

Wondering what exit he should use, Colbert recalls being approached by actor Harry Lennix, whom he knew from their days at Northwestern University. Colbert indicated that he sensed some of the audience wasn't happy. "And he [Lennix] said, 'f- these people."

Indeed.

Dave Weigel makes a point the Dish has been banging on about for a year and a half now:

The problem is that Palin has put the political press in a submissive position, one in which the only information it prints about her comes from prepared statements or from Q&As with friendly interviewers. This isn’t something most politicians get away with, or would be allowed to get away with. But Palin has leveraged her celebrity — her ability to get ratings, the ardor of her fans and the bitterness of her critics — to win a truly unique relationship with the press. She is allowed to shape the public debate without actually engaging in it.

To be fair to Palin, she had every right to try and get away with this. But she couldn't have if the press had truly resisted together. They could have all refused to do one-on-one interviews until she gave a live, long, no-holds-barred press conference, answering any question asked. But they didn't. They each wanted their ratings-winning "get" more than they wanted to expose this person's ineptitude and cluelessness for the good of the country.

They've also lost their nerve, fearing that aggressive, adult but civil questioning of Palin would get them tarred elitist or condescending or all the other class warfare memes the GOP is now so adept at deploying. And so this farce of a candidate continues to plague us.

But, yes, Dave, it probably doesn't help to cite her Facebook nonsense. I just feel a responsibility to keep tabs on the lunacy, and have done since it began.

A reader submits Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Paper.” It centers on a homeless man: