Month: October 2010

Toast Or Roast: Ezra Klein


I never thought a blog would make me feel old. Blogs are supposed to be new. Young. But congratulations to the Daily Dish, which has done it. It is, to be sure, just one of the Dish's many firsts.

As a professional blogger who came after the Dish, my main debt is not to what you've blogged, but how you blogged. The value of reader e-mails, of simple quotations, of dissents, of regular features. And then, later, the realization that a blog was much like a magazine, and it could be improved by the addition of staff, and could be bettered by specialization. In fact, it was the organizational structure of the Dish that gave me the idea to bring on Dylan Matthews and create Wonkbook. My exact pitch to the editors was "I want to do for economic and domestic policy what Andrew Sullivan does for Andrew Sullivan's brain." They bought it, in part because they enjoyed what Andrew Sullivan has done for Andrew Sullivan's brain. Now, if only I could convince higher-ups of the value of taking August off…

Happy 10th, Dish.

Read Ezra at his eponymous blog.

Toast Or Roast: Ed Brayton


As much as I love roasts, I think I'll stick with a toast on this one. What I admire most about Andrew Sullivan is that even when I disagree with him on an issue I have to admire his unfailing intellectual honesty in presenting his case. He doesn't leave out important information to make his case seem stronger, he doesn't beat up straw men and he doesn't engage in what I call 'sports fan politics' by choosing a side and then filtering all information through the prism of that predetermined position. He rarely experiences cognitive dissonance as a result, and when he does he acknowledges it frankly rather than rationalizing it away. He provides an example to aspire to. Congratulations on 10 years, Andrew. I'm coming up on 7 years next month myself.

Read Ed at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

A Decade Of The Dish: Your Reflections I

A reader writes:

I worked for many years in radio, and we have a special category of listeners we call "long time listeners/ first time callers." They are 99% of all radio listeners who genuinely enjoy what they hear most every day, but never get around to calling the station. With regard to your blog, it's probably safe to say that 99% of your readers never get around to clicking the "email Andrew" link, yet they read you frequently, possibly multiple times daily. They read, they think; they laugh and cry, and look through the views from your infinite windows. Count me among your long time readers/ first time e-mailers. Kudos to you and your staff on your 10th anniversary, and please know that for many of the 99%ers out here, we can't imagine a day without another helping from the Dish.

Another writes:

As an outsider looking in, I am very grateful for your blog’s existence. Yours is a sane voice in the midst of all-too-pervasive hysteria, and a sane conservative voice, which as someone to the left, I welcome with all my heart. As someone who loves Americans and loves (mostly) America, I yearn for them to return to civilized, respectful discourse, motivated not by ideology but by pragmatism. A lot of us outside the borders of the United States are hoping and praying that America shows greater unity in the face of some very grave challenges we all are confronting. May America listen to the better angles of its nature. Thank you Andrew, your blog is a bright spot.

Another:

As I do every morning, I woke up, made coffee and opened my window to the sounds and smells of Paris, then settled in to see what you and your team had to say during the night, while I slept. With an RSS feedreader overwhelmed by more than 500 feeds and subsequently abandoned, I've honed down my news and commentary sources to very few, and your blog is one of them. On your 10th anniversary, I'd like to tell you how and why you fit into my life.

I found Blogger in 2006, after almost killing myself trying to fit into corporate America and finally quitting, with no job prospects in sight. I was 50 and I was going to do what I was meant to do: write. I had also been apolitical for most of my life, being raised in a family where compassion for those less fortunate was a weakness and worthy of derision. Christmas cards from Nixon hung proudly on my mother's wall, and her library upstairs was packed with books like Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative (my Canadian mother became a US citizen in order to work for Goldwater's campaign) and currently her coffee table sports books by Malkin and Colter. To my entire family, Limbaugh is a "true patriot." I don't have any idea how I managed, from birth, to be a liberal, but as the youngest of six kids I had to completely disconnect from politics or I would have been shouted down every time I made a liberal squeak.

But George Bush's administration pushed me out of my lethargy and I got so angry that I started educating myself – thus the 500 RSS feeds. I learned about PNAC and neoconservatism, about AIPAC, Israel and Zionism and continue to learn about Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran. But what would I do with all this new information? How could I make analysis and express my opinions? Blogger. It had some magical interface that made it possible for this writer who never could take the time to write to do so.

Here's where you come in. I did not want to fall into the same trap as my family – only reading authors that supported my worldview. I was looking for someone – not of the left – who reflected some of the conservative values that I was still able to hear underneath all the loud derision of my family's discourse. I know, based on my experience working for the US Army and Marine Corps and then a military contractor, that government-run anything is a mess of waste and inefficiency. I have an ingrained respect for entrepreneurship and business – for, dare I say, Capitalism. I believe in a cautious, deliberate approach to policy. These values come from my conservative upbringing, even though they were all trounced upon by Bush's supposedly conservative administration. So, you were the conservative voice I chose to subscribe to.

In addition, and also so very important, you turned me on to The View From Your Window and Blurb. I spent this entire summer traveling through France with my French friend. While she inspected châteaux and B&Bs for her guide book, I took a view-from-your-window picture from every château. (Some day, I'll get around to sending them to you :-) But, having lost access to a fancy New York book agent when I walked away from my formerly-famous journalist boyfriend, Blurb was the answer. It will allow me to form my summer travel adventures into a book that I can self publish. This was a great gift from you.

And if you're still miraculously reading this novel of an email, thank God for the respect and love of you and your team for long-form literature and journalism. There's a place for me, after all.

Toast Or Roast: Ann Althouse


Well, Andrew Sullivan was incomprehensibly mean to me when I got engaged and I never really understood the hostility. But the truth is, the husband I found through blogging found me through Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan's article in the NYT Magazine — "This Is a Religious War" — published shortly after the 9/11 attacks — made a profound impression on the man I would later marry and led him to begin reading Andrew's blog and, from there, other blogs, including mine.

Me, I've been reading The Daily Dish since it began, and I keep reading and linking even though any given link of mine is likely to provoke one of my commenters to denounce me for linking to Sullivan. Andrew is always changing, and one could go through cycles of loving or hating him — I especially love the Andrew Sullivan of "The Great Gay Debate" —  but it's not really worth getting all exercised about which Andrew Sullivan we're reading today. We keep reading.

Read Ann at her eponymous blog.

Toast Or Roast: Ben Smith


I learned how to blog from reading Andrew. He basically created the model that I try to follow: The incremental pursuit of a handful of threads and arguments over months and years; the insistence on writing for the smartest reader, not the dumbest; the direct engagement with readers and what readers find interesting; and the willingness to include opposing views and even totally change one's mind. I disagree with him frequently, and always have, but haven't ever stopped reading.

Read Ben at his eponymous Politico blog.

The Blame Game

Roman Polanski's rape victim, Samantha Geimer, hates Polanski far less than many others do. Anna North takes a second look at rape as portrayed in the media:

[P]erhaps what Geimer's appearance … should teach us is simply that rape victims shouldn't be held responsible for feeling any particular way about their rapists. It's not Geimer's responsibility to hate Polanski (she says she never did), to wish him ill, or to want him jailed. Instead, it's the court's responsibility to bring him to justice, and his responsibility to accept it.

In this case, both have failed — and though some have pointed to Geimer's forgiveness as evidence that the whole incident deserves to be forgotten, none of us should forget that a rape case turned into an extended opportunity for rape apology because a rapist fled and a judge mishandled his job.

Yes, We Are At War, Ctd

The NYT weighs in today on the debate we've been having. It seems like a pretty sensible position to me. And one thing worth adding to the conversation:

The Obama administration has sharply expanded the shadow war against terrorists, using both the military and the C.I.A. to track down and kill hundreds of them, in a dozen countries, on and off the battlefield. The drone program has been effective, killing more than 400 Al Qaeda militants this year alone, according to American officials, but fewer than 10 noncombatants.

This is not always without costs. But it tells you something about the failure of this administration to tell a story of its very effective war against al Qaeda that would impress many Americans still being blasted with FNC/RNC propaganda about Obama's alleged weakness. On the other hand, this is a constructive suggestion:

The government could establish a court like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes wiretaps on foreign agents inside the United States. Before it adds people to its target list and begins tracking them, the government could take its evidence to this court behind closed doors — along with proof of its compliance with international law — and get the equivalent of a judicial warrant in a timely and efficient way.