Month: July 2010

by Dave Weigel

I'm Dave Weigel and a few weeks ago I would have written a different — longer, probably — introduction to my guest posts. But I have a happy history with this blog. Back in the summer of 2006 Andrew graciously asked me to help guest blog for him while he took  a week off. This was, to my surprise, a news story. (For some reason people like to write articles about bloggers. It seems rather silly to me. Why not just tweet?)

At the time, I was an assistant editor of Reason magazine. Over the next four years I wrote for a bunch of magazines, joined the Washington Independent as a reporter on what we grandly called "the remaking of the right," joined the Washington Post to cover the same thing, and left the Post after someone maliciously leaked excerpts from e-mails I'd sent to the JournoList e-mail group. As an effort to educate me on how to better handle and cover my subjects, it was a success; as an efforts to boot me out of journalism, it was less successful. So I'll be blogging here all week alongside your other pinch-hitters. Housekeeping note: I am spending the week in Alaska, so in terms of when posts go up I may be behind the East and West coat elitists who make up the demand side of the blogosphere.

No, I am not looking for real estate in Wasilla. Be serious.

by Chris Bodenner

Dayo Olopade reflects on the real winner of the 2010 Word Cup:

For one month of one South African winter, the tournament brought an international celebration to a continent more widely known for malnourished bodies, grandstanding leaders and the ravages of AIDS. Rather than indigence, the world saw balls sailing into the net, crisp tackles, sweat. Ten gleaming stadiums and the collective warmth of 50 million South Africans offered thousands of football pilgrims the time of their lives. In a year that marks five decades of independence for 17 African countries, from Somalia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the cup doubled as an anniversary party.

by David Frum

Perhaps a word of background about what I’m doing here in these unexpected surroundings. Andrew and I have been acquainted since the mid-1980s, when he was a Harvard graduate student and I was enrolled in the law school. I led a section of the late Judith Shklar’s class in the Government department. The section met in a classroom that was used by a section led by Andrew that ended immediately before. All semester I wiped his handwriting off the blackboard, but I don’t think we ever once encountered each other in person.

That experience prefigured the next quarter century. Andrew and I have exchanged tens of thousands of words first on paper then online, written tens of thousands of words about each other. Yet if I am tallying aright, I don’t think we’ve been in the same room with each other on even a dozen occasions.

And now here I am again, writing on Andrew’s blackboard after he has gone.

Back then we both identified intellectually and emotionally with the trans-Atlantic conservative movement. Andrew no longer does. I still do. As the Obama presidency under-delivers on its over-promises, an effective and intelligent conservatism is more needed than ever. I’ve been writing and thinking a lot over the past few years about how such a conservatism can be rebuilt. I’ll be continuing that conversation in this space. I’m very aware that many readers will feel nothing but skepticism about conservative rebuilding. For them, conservatism means Limbaugh and Beck and Palin. But it does not – must not – cannot. 

What it might mean instead? There's a fine topic for the week ahead.

by Chris Bodenner

The city could become the first to ban the sale of all pets (except fish):

The idea originated about two years ago, when the commission began looking into a ban on dog and cat sales as a way to discourage puppy and kitten mills. But the city's animal control staff said that excess puppies and kittens are not the problem at the city shelter, thanks to the plethora of rescue groups. In any case, only one or two pet stores in San Francisco sell dogs and cats. The rest stick to small animals.

The real problem, staff said, is hamsters. People buy the high-strung, nocturnal rodents because they're under the temporary impression that hamsters are cute and cuddly. But the new owners quickly learn that hamsters are, in fact, prone to biting, gnawing through expensive wiring and maniacally racing on their exercise wheels at 2 a.m.

Claire Berlinksi lays out the moral case against the pet trade. Brian Moylan finds the potential ban dumb and impractical:

It just means that if you want to get some sort of living play thing for your child, you'll just ride across the Golden Gate Bridge and stop by the nearest strip mall that has a pet store and buy one. A 30-minute drive isn't that much a deterrent. … Maybe we should just treat pets like cigarettes and alcohol and put heavy taxes on them. That might stop people just going out there and picking up pets as often as a subject on an episode of Hoarders takes broken picture frames out of a dumpster.

Speaking of pets and hoarders, all dog lovers should check out this clip.

(Photo by Flickrite citron_smurf)

by Patrick Appel

Bernstein fears that we are about to find out:

Candidates aren't completely irrelevant.  The statistical models don't capture everything that happens (and don't claim to); it's certainly very possible that a good candidate could do a bit better than a lousy one.  But absent something spectacular, that's apt to be in the range of a percentage point or two.
Now, the one thing to add to this, and getting back to Palin, is that so far all the major party nominees — at least in the era for which we have good enough data to run the models — have been more or less adequate … Sarah Palin, on the other hand…we've never had a nominee anything like what she would be. 

We've had nominees with weak polling numbers, but nothing anywhere close to her unpopularity.  We've had candidates who didn't seem to have learned much beyond the basics of public policy, but she appears (still, at this late date) to be a step or two below the worst we've seen on that score.  I don't recall anyone who was nominated after the sorts of ethics difficulties she's had; I don't recall anyone who was nominated with such little experience (and, yes, Obama in 2008 was relatively inexperienced, but not as much as she is).  Despite all that, she certainly could wind up (were she nominated) doing about as well as a generic Republican as conservative as she is would do, but it does seem to me that there's a huge amount of potential downside here that Republicans would be nuts to risk. 

Of course, Republicans would also be nuts to nominate her because, should she actually win, they'd have a disaster in the White House.

She is starting to build a political operation.

by David Frum

Behold the insidious reach of the Israel lobby. Andrew Sullivan takes a holiday and he invites me of all people to join Dave Weigel as a guest bloggers. I’ll be cross-posting all this week here at the Daily Dish and at my own site, FrumForum.com.

Now – time to rethink the Middle East!

We’ll start with the Economist’s cringing obituary of the Lebanese Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Fadlallah:

“Once damned by Westerners as a mentor to hostage-takers and suicide-bombers, he was viewed by his own flock as the most open-minded of ayatollahs.”

Sound familiar? Yes, life imitates The Onion once again …

IRAQI GANDHI PREACHES SLIGHTLY LESS VIOLENCE

"Violence is not the solution," al-Naqib wrote in his breakthrough 1998 treatise Practicing Semiviolence. "It is only approximately 19/20ths of the solution. We should not work toward the total annihilation of all who oppose us—just some of them. And perhaps it is best we practice occasional mercy for the innocent, such as the young, who can easily recuperate."

In a 2003 interview with British newspaper The Guardian, al-Naqib said that the "decadent immorality of Western civilization must be almost, but not quite, wiped off the face of the earth."

Above is a clip of Dave Weigel and David Frum discussing partisanship in DC and how neither of them fit very well in either camp at the moment. I'm beyond chuffed to note that both Dave and David have kindly agreed to guest-blog this next week while I take a short break. Underbloggers Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner will be chipping in as usual. See you in a week's time. Be polite to our guests. They will be reading the in-tray while I waddle in some tidal pools.

I've gushed over her before and quoted from her new book, "Absence of Mind." There's an interview with her in the Atlantic here from 2004 by Jennie Rothenberg Gritz. So it as great to see her on Stewart, even if she probably soared a few thousand feet above the heads of many of the viewers:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
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Alan Wolfe reviews Terry Eagleton's new book:

“We cannot pass reliable moral judgment on the human species,” he argues, “because we have never been able to observe it other than in desperately deformed conditions.” Lift the burdens imposed by scarcity and poverty, and then we will find that human beings need not kill others to make up for their moral and psychological failings. This seems to me, if I may be so crude as to repair to the language of social science, a non-falsifiable proposition, assuming, as it does, a condition that will never be met. Such futuristic speculation is not what we would expect from a self-proclaimed realist, but logical consistency is not remotely Eagleton’s strength.