Month: December 2010

I enjoy reading Frank Rich's column every week. It's usually a deeply researched, beautifully constructed, passionate read. But I wish it varied a little more. Longing for Barack Obama to be some kind of Huey Long, opening can after can of whup-ass on Rush Limbaugh's jiggly behind  seems, well, quixotic to me. And if I thought there was some way to win a culture and rhetorical war against the FNC/RNC vortex, I could see the point of this very elegant sentence:

No one expects Obama to imitate Christie’s in-your-face, bull-in-the-china-shop shtick. But they have waited in vain for him to stand firm on what matters to him and to the country rather than forever attempting to turn non-argumentative reasonableness into its own virtuous reward.

This strikes me as grotesquely unfair. I sure know what matters to the president, and a brief survey of his first two years would reveal it rather baldly.

"Non-argumentative reasonableness" so far has prevented a second great depression, rescued Detroit, bailed out the banks, pitlessly isolated Tehran's regime, exposed Netanyahu, decimated al Qaeda's mid-level leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan, withdrawn troops from Iraq on schedule, gotten two Justices on the Supreme Court, cut a point or two off the unemployment rate with the stimulus, seen real wages for those employed grow, presided over a stock market boom and record corporate profits, and maneuvered a GOP still intoxicated with failed ideology to become more and more wedded to white, old evangelicals led by Sarah Palin. And did I mention universal health insurance – the holy grail for Democrats for decades?

Ah, yes: Obama's restraint has been such a disaster, hasn't it? I'm with Carpenter:

Obama of course did stand firm on upper-end tax cuts throughout the 2008 campaign and continued standing in like manner as president — until, that is, it became all too obvious that success in Congress was not an option.

The timing of Obama's D-Day offensive against the recalcitrant GOP remains precarious. My initial thoughts were, for reasons explained, that he'd dismiss the tax-cut issue as his artillery-opening opportunity, but use it to assault Republicans when they then denied him a vote on New Start. Some reasonably lengthy demonstration of presidential good faith is incumbent on Obama in order to persuade independents that he's the reasonable One; and, it seems to me, on tax cuts Republicans are playing right into his carressing hand.

Yet, as I noted earlier, such timing might be aggressively premature. Obama might yet delay his assault well into 2011, and, my guess, initially over some relatively insignificant piece of legislation (for what else will we see next year?) — a political skirmish on which he can build, more and more thunderously, more and more Trumanesquely, heading into 2012.

Yes, we have totes – and at $16, they're much more affordable than the vintage, hand-printed Dish Ts. Check here for the design on the reverse and several new colors for the Ts, including this one (red and white now available too):

Many readers have had their jaws drop at the price of the regular Ts. We know, we know: $50 is a large amount for a t-shirt. And you feel that way until you see or wear the Rogues' Gallery clothes. I picked them because I wear them and love them – and suspect you will too. They are each hand-printed on vintage old t-shirts, that have a soft and yet robust texture, never shrink, and last forever. They're the most comfortable and durable t-shirts I have ever bought or worn – and I can't stop wearing them. I wanted Dish readers to have something classier and subtler than the usual mass market merchandise, even at the price of a higher cost. But the totes – and upcoming cheaper items – are much more accessible, even though they are also hand-printed.

Women readers have also asked if the unisex t-shirts work for them. Yes, they do – just pick a size one smaller than your usual in women's sizes. They're meant to be loose-fitting and hang beautifully on men and women of all shapes and sizes.

If you love the Dish and want to show it, have at it. If you're wondering what to get for Christmas for someone you know is a Dish-addict, you couldn't do better. And if you also want to support the Dish, and show your appreciation for the truly hard work that Patrick, Chris, Zoe and Conor do every day, the revenue from this will help support their work going forward.

The full shop is here. Merry merry. And please support the Dish in our first ever merchandising effort ever. We want to be around for another ten years and this added revenue stream is one way to help that happen.

Don Davis does the math on DADT:

[T]he next time someone’s talking about how much national security might be threatened if we change DADT, you can tell them that there’s a cost to national security from keeping DADT as well.

How much of a cost? If you pulled those 115,000 potentially affected troops from the Army, DADT could cost us two Iraqs worth of troops, with 15,000 reinforcements left over, and if it was just the Navy, it could affect enough sailors to crew every aircraft carrier and submarine and 30,000 more besides.

If you removed that many personnel from the Air Force it would affect more people than the entire Air National Guard and seven years’ worth of new pilots combined—or, if you prefer to look at it through the prism of a eagle, globe and anchor, it could be enough LBGT Marines to take and hold darn near anything, from the halls of Montezuma, to at least somewhere near the shores of Tripoli.

Jeffrey Toobin takes stock of Bush v. Gore on its tenth anniversary:

In the first ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that ended the doctrine of separate but equal in public education, the Justices cited the case more than twenty-five times. In the ten years after Roe v. Wade, the abortion-rights decision of 1973, there were more than sixty-five references to that landmark.

This month marks ten years since the Court, by a vote of five-to-four, terminated the election of 2000 and delivered the Presidency to George W. Bush. Over that decade, the Justices have provided a verdict of sorts on Bush v. Gore by the number of times they have cited it: zero. …

Many of the issues before the Supreme Court combine law and politics in ways that are impossible to separate. It is, moreover, unreasonable to expect the Justices to operate in a world hermetically cut off from the gritty motives of Democrats and Republicans. But the least we can expect from these men and women is that at politically charged moments—indeed, especially at those times—they apply the same principles that guide them in everyday cases. This, ultimately, is the tragedy of Bush v. Gore. The case didn’t just scar the Court’s record; it damaged the Court’s honor.

Yoav Fromer profiles Yaakov “Kobi” Shimoni, also known as Subliminal, one of Israel's most popular conservative rappers:

Although a rapper by name, Subliminal radically defies the archetypical characteristics of traditional hip-hop performers. He doesn’t drink, smoke, do drugs, or fight, and he preaches against these things in his music. Sporting a self-styled wardrobe he refers to as “chic-Zionism,” his bling is a colossal diamond-covered Star of David necklace. He wears baggy pants, oversized knee-length jerseys, and sideways baseball caps—the style of a “gangsta rapper” without any of the “gangsta” features. Like a reformed rapper who lacks those rebellious qualities that for good or bad may actually make rap interesting in the first place, Subliminal offers his fans a sterilized hip-hop spectacle: Snoop without the weed, Eminem without the rage, or Tupac without the guns….

For anyone seeking to understand Israel’s right turn in recent years—a trend exemplified by the government’s decision to require loyalty oaths from its non-Jewish population—Subliminal’s music seems like a good place to start. …

Unlike American hip-hop, which developed in stark opposition to anything that could be associated with the establishment, Subliminal’s self-proclaimed “Zionist hip-hop” has always followed an inverted model. (He half-jokingly told me, “I am the establishment.”) While Public Enemy called on listeners to “fight the power,” Subliminal instead decided to join it. “This is Israel, not America” he explained. “If I see a cop chasing someone down the street, odds are, you will see me running along to help out the cop.”

Listening to all of his music at once can feel like taking in a full DVD box set of after-school specials, with a broad set of subjects: hope, patriotism, strength, unity, order, faith, and peace. There is no mention of hatred, racism, Islamophobia, Israeli occupation, or other touchstones of Israeli radicalism. The image of violence—the sine qua non for any self-respecting extremist—is unequivocally presented in a negative light and shunned rather than sanctioned by his music. “When a song makes a left-wing stance they call it protest,” says Arye Avitan (aka “Tchulu”), who owns a chain of hip-hop clothing stores and is a veteran music producer who has mentored many young rappers, including Subliminal. “But when it suggests something remotely right-wing, they immediately call it fascism.”

The New Oxford Review is on the case:

Fr. James E. Mason is a priest in the Diocese of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He is Vice Chancellor of the Diocese and Director of Vocations. In an article in Homiletic & Pastoral Review (May), he says it's a "rare seminary or diocese that will recognize the vice…[of] effeminacy." St. Thomas Aquinas said that effeminacy is the vice of delicacy and is opposed to perseverance.

Says Fr. Mason: "Many bishops, seminary faculty and priests…suffer under this vice and are therefore unwilling or unable to recognize it as a vice and address it…. Does the seminary deal with a seminarian that sways when he walks, who has limp wrists, who acts like a drama queen or who lisps? It must."

Er, has anyone seen the Pope lately? I mean, if you can find him behind his jewels, outfits, personally manufactured hats, Prada slippers, gorgeous personal assistant and incense?

John Holbo imagines the Wikileaks mentality applied to a sci-fi future where computers predict and store our internet searches:

Google (or whoever) has figured out that internet searching goes much better if the machine can read you raw at every level and log all that stuff. People go along with it. Of course, privacy is assured.

Julian Assange (Assange’s envatted brain, or whoever) stages a massive, Wikileaks-style intelligence release: Psycheleaks. Everyone gets up one morning and finds, to their horror, that in the night have sprung up public ‘Psykis’, consisting of everyone’s logged-and-now-leaked thoughts – down to every last little Underground Man-style private fantasy. And the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel got to read the dreams earlier than everyone else, etc.

(Image of Modern Life-UPBRINGING by KD)

Megan explains.

Andy Martin explores whether Wittgenstein, among other philosophers, was autistic, and whether it might have made him a better philosopher:

What do we make of those dense, elegiac and perhaps incomprehensible final lines, sometimes translated as “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent”? Positioned as it is right at the end of the book (like “the rest is silence” at the end of “Hamlet”), proposition number 7 is apt to be associated with death or the afterlife. But translating it yet again into the sort of terms a psychologist would readily grasp, perhaps Wittgenstein is also hinting: “I am autistic” or “I am mindblind.” Or, to put it another way, autism is not some exotic anomaly but rather a constant. …

One implication of what a psychologist might say about autism goes something like this: you, a philosopher, are mindblind and liable to take up philosophy precisely because you don’t “get” what other people are saying to you. You, like Wittgenstein, have a habit of hearing and seeing propositions, but feeling that they say nothing (as if they were rendered in Chinese). In other words, philosophy would be a tendency to interpret what people say as a puzzle of some kind, a machine that may or may not work.

Foxes playing in a snowy South London garden, set to “Always Breathe” by Airport 85:

(Hat tip: TDW)