Here is prime example of how Huntsman's 2012 strategy, in the words of Ezra Klein, is to "agree with the GOP on policy, but be moderate in argument":
HUNTSMAN: I hate the thought of a fence on the border. I mean, for me, as an American, the thought of a fence, it to some extent repulses me, because it’s not consistent with our overall — the image that we projected from the very beginning to the rest of the world. But the situation is such that I don’t think we have a choice.
A reader writes:
Many Christians such as yourself think Camping is a "nut-ball" because he tried to predict the date of the Rapture. I'm sorry, but isn't it far more crazy to believe that there will be a Rapture in the first place? Yet belief in this supernatural, apocalyptic event is very common in this country. According to a Pew poll, 41% of Americans believe Christ will return by 2050.
Ed Kilgore also flags those findings – "The total number rises to 58 percent among white evangelicals" – and notes their connection to supporters of settlement expansion. Many Dish readers are echoing this one:
You wrote that "not to laugh at such idiocies seems more than a little quixotic to me. And the Rapture nutters are not orthodox Christians – but rather Book of Revelations crackpots. They are not examples of religious faith but of marginal nutballism. Such nutballism begs to be made fun of." My question/criticism is: how is such "nutballism" in any qualitative way different from Catholicism, or Episcopalianism, or Islam…?
I once had a conversation with my brother in which he was laughing at a news report of the image of Jesus appearing on a tortilla or some such. "People who believe in this are silly" he claimed. "But why?" I asked, are they one whit sillier than any of those who believe that 2000 years ago someone revived after having been dead for 3 days?" He was (for once in his life) speechless.
I guess I don't see how the usual apologetics ("Credo quia absurdum est" etc) can't be applied just as easily to "Rapture nutballs" as to anybody else. Yes, of course I recognize that there's a vast body of theology behind (eg) Catholicism, but it still at core requires a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, otherwise it's just arguing about angels on the head of a pin. Once one leap of faith is taken, how do we get to say that this leap of faith is bold and courageous, and that one is nutballism?
I'm genuinely interested to hear your answer, because I think that this is one of the core questions that the Abrahamic religions have to face and answer honestly.
The content of the faith I hold has been honed and corrected and debated for centuries; and it must, by definition, be consonant with truth as we find it on earth. Part of my tradition does not pore over the Book Of Revelation to find Dan Brown-style clues and signs of the Apocalypse. Such a way of reading Scripture is a category error. Of all the books in the Bible, Revelation is the most marginal, the most disputed and, to my mind, more like a bad trip at Burning Man than a serious contribution to our spiritual understanding or quest.
The idea that a leap of faith requires complete abandonment of reason, or the making of distinctions, or careful study of texts in their proper – rather than distorted – context is, in my view, a false one, however convenient it sometimes is for atheist contempt. I am not a fundamentalist; I do not see Scripture as literal, let alone some kind of puzzle to be deciphered for fortune telling.
I am, however, a skeptic of the end-times altogether. Partly because I don't believe that salvation has such a temporal quality. It is outside of time, as God is. That makes me a heretic in one respect.
"We don’t need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America, we need to reread the Constitution and enforce the Constitution. … And I know that there are some people that are not going to do that, so for the benefit of those who are not going to read it because they don’t want us to go by the Constitution, there’s a little section in there that talks about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'” – Herman Cain, quoting the Declaration of Independence.
This quote, his right of return confusion, and his Afghanistan non-plan do not bode well. And Michelle Bachmann thought the cradle of the American revolution was New Hampshire. Why are so many of those eager to base our current policies on the distant past clearly incapable of passing the citizenship exam?
Michael Grunwald is afraid that the GOP could get even more extreme:
If Huntsman or Romney wins the nomination, and then Obama wins the election, the GOP will quickly shift from “loosely tethered to reality” to “out of its freaking mind.”
Remember, after its crushing defeat in 2008, the party faithful concluded that John McCain lost the election because he wasn’t conservative enough—and that George W. Bush lost his popularity because of his big spending. So the party moved even farther toward its right-wing base, casting away moderates like Arlen Specter, Charlie Crist and Michael Bloomberg. And its comeback victory in 2010 seemed to validate that strategy. A Huntsman or Romney defeat would just prove to the party that electoral salvation lies in ideological purity and rigid obstructionism, the kind of conclusion that already appeals to Tea Party activists who consider Obama some kind of tyrannical socialist usurper.
Grunwald goes on to imagine the consequences of various candidates winning or losing to Obama. Kevin Drum turned Grunwald's scenarios into the above chart.
The beer company wants you to grow one – to save the planet.
David Brooks explains why fear of an intellectual tsunami/black hole is what forced him to duck and cover as Newt Gingrich descended.
Kevin Drum highlights an example in a review of Frank Bailey's book:
Bailey also helped smear a neighbor who complained about excessive tourist traffic around the governor’s mansion. After hearing of the gripe, Palin sent her daughter Piper out to sell lemonade and then derided her neighbor for protesting children at play. Soon, the neighbor was portrayed on conservative blogs as “sick,” “unhinged” and “drug-addicted.”
“By the time we finished with our politics of destruction, he surely regretted ever mentioning the governor’s name,” Bailey writes. “He learned firsthand why so few people were willing to speak out against Sarah Palin.”
Witness the Democratic Majority Leader in the Senate directly attack his own president over a critical foreign policy stance to appease the pro-Israel lobby. Inconceivable on any other foreign policy issue. Meanwhile, AIPAC’s control of the US Congress will be demonstrated more powerfully than ever today, as Netanyahu, fresh after a contemptuous and furious meeting with the president, will now attempt to cut an American president off at the knees, by interfering in another country’s affairs. Again: can you think of any other analogy to this kind of thing?
And remember what this is about: not cutting off aid, not imposing any solution, not reassessing loan guarantees, not putting the UN veto in question. Just saying the words “1967 borders” is such an affront to the pro-Israel lobby it must rally the entire US Congress against its own president, and threaten to cut off donations to the Democrats. And recall that this statement was issued by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs just November 11. Money quote:
The Prime Minister and the Secretary agreed on the importance of continuing direct negotiations to achieve our goals. The Secretary reiterated that “the United States believes that through good-faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.” Those requirements will be fully taken into account in any future peace agreement.
My italics. Now that’s lobby power. What was once an idea the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs deemed anodine is now a radical break designed to weaken Israel. But, of course, the pro-Israel lobby doesn’t exist, and mere mention of it makes one an anti-Semite. But without the power of that lobby, how do you make any empirical sense of last week’s events at all?
(Photo: Young Jewish settlers stack rocks in an attempt to build a new outpost on a hilltop, on May 23, 2011 near the West Bank Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim, West Bank. Tensions between Israel and United States remain high over the growing Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Last week President Obama called for a return to Israel’s 1967 borders with landswaps. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.)
A new exhibit at Halifax’s Maritime Museum explores its history:
When Nova Scotia’s Samuel Cunard founded his iconic ocean liner company in 1840, he had no idea that his massive ships would, in the period following the Second World War, become home to elaborate drag shows and some of the first gay weddings. … That this evolution of gay culture took place on the high seas is no accident. "Economic factors drove these companies to hire large numbers of gay men," says [curator Dan] Conlin. "Passengers enjoyed their witty banter and music shows. [The companies] would gladly turn a blind eye to sexual preference, for profit’s sake."
The Dish 